“Creating a fantastic work culture” with Steve El-Hage Co-founder and CEO of Massdrop

Steve El-Hage is Co-founder and CEO of Massdrop, which was founded in 2012. A community-driven commerce destination, Massdrop makes best-in-class products with input from passionate people and is a place to connect, learn, and shop with others who share their interests, including tech, audio, apparel, outdoor gear, and home goods. Along with Massdrop Made products, Massdrop carries coveted products from other leading brands.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and was very driven by the things I was interested in — my passions. When I was 11, I would buy packs of gum and sell it by the stick to my classmates for a profit. When I was 13, I started a computer repair business in my neighborhood. In college, I started a small hedge fund and thought that’s where my future was headed, but in my senior year, I co-founded Massdrop, which was an unexpected path. I grew up in enthusiast communities and understood these people and the forums where we existed. My co-founder and I saw an opportunity to build a new kind of platform and provide resources to better enable passionate people to bring their ideas to life. Combining my micro life skills expedited the business and six weeks later, we had a product, users, revenue, and raised our first round of funding.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

About two years in, we started growing extremely quickly. We grew from 13 people to about 70 people within 12 months. Things started breaking left and right. New employees would show up and we didn’t have desks for them yet, people didn’t know our goals or what the company was working on. We had to institutionalize our culture and build a ton of new process to ensure success across the board for all employees, new and existing.

During this period, we built a week-long onboarding program that included our company history, alignment around our vision, mission and goals, dedicated time to experiencing the full product experience and providing feedback, and a buddy program to help them meet new people and answer any questions that they have. Execs and founders would present, and each employee would have an hour with me. This all needed to happen to scale and get going as soon as possible. Our onboarding process has evolved since, but that whole experience was an amazing ride.

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We want to create deep connections between people and their passions whether it’s around an interest a person already has or helping them create interest in something new. And, it’s important to make this all widely accessible to all types of people. I think Massdrop is really uniquely positioned to deliver on all of this. The products we make are designed to be the best in the world and are made with input from the most passionate and knowledgeable people in the world. We partner with amazing brands, curate some of the best products out there, and we provide a platform for people to share their interests with others like them

Ok, lets jump to the main part of our interview. According to this study cited in Forbes, more than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Why do you think that number is so high?

I think it’s really important that people join a company for the right reasons. Things like high salaries and prestige can be distracting from the factors that ultimately contribute the most to happiness. Do you care about what the company is building? Have you met your manager and gotten a good idea of what it’d be like to work with them? When interviewing somewhere new, ask about the company’s efforts for learning and development. These types of things play a big role in long term happiness.

Based on your experience or research, how do you think an unhappy workforce will impact a) company productivity b) company profitability c) and employee health and wellbeing?

It’s really amazing how above and beyond employees will go when they’re happy with the people they work for or with, are aligned with the company vision and mission, and like the work they do. People are more creative, care a ton more about what the goals of the company are, and teamwork is so easy and frictionless. You really get the best version of each person you hired.

An unhappy workforce can undo or create a lapse in what everyone has collectively worked so hard to achieve. If that happens it can take time to rebuild — whether it be productivity, profitability, or employee health and wellbeing. It’s the responsibility of leaders to keep their finger on the pulse of company culture, be proactive in making it healthy, welcome employee feedback, and be prepared to do what’s necessary to address issues, no matter how difficult they may be.

Can you share 5 things that managers and executives should be doing to improve their company work culture? Can you give a personal story or example for each?

• Spend a lot of time aligning employees around company vision and strategy and talk through exactly how what they’re doing fits into that. That should always be the unwavering north star that will carry them through their company career. This is a key part of our onboarding process.
• Invest in your people. Take the time to understand the personal goals of people on your team and to meet with people who are across different title levels. Managers are often afraid to ask what employees want to do after working at the current company. Don’t be. Find out three ways they want to develop every year and commit to helping them achieve those. Be a mentor. There’s a ripple effect that happens around how we care and are listening and that two-way trust is powerful.
• Take all-company meetings seriously. Use these as a way to bring employees together, celebrate wins, deliver updates, and act as a motivational tool. Leaders should look at these as something valuable, not as something that’s procedural. When planning these, leaders should also be plugged in and know what people want to rally behind.
• Have high standards and don’t accept mediocrity. Beyond productivity and profitability implications, keeping problematic people around is the fastest way to lose your good people. Sometimes difficult decisions need to happen as a result and there may be a tough period of transition, but the outcome is ultimately positive.
• Conduct anonymous culture surveys twice a year — and listen to the results and put action plans into place. This is important to instilling trust and retention across a company. For Massdrop, things like our benefits philosophy, how we invest in career development, and our company events all came through culture surveys.

It’s very nice to suggest ideas, but it seems like we have to “change the culture regarding work culture”. What can we do as a society to make a broader change in the US workforce work culture?

I believe companies need to trust their employees to get their work done however they need to get it done. Everyone has a different personality, motivators, and work styles. If someone works better from home or remotely in order to deliver their best version of a plan or needs to work from home sometimes for whatever reason, companies and managers should be supportive of this. Additionally, it’s important to encourage time off. At Massdrop, we have an unlimited vacation days policy, which our employees do take advantage of. This ends up being win-win for both the employee and employer. While this practice is becoming more common within the start-up world and in Silicon Valley, it hasn’t with big institutions. I believe this should change.

How would you describe your leadership or management style? Can you give us a few examples?

I am a huge proponent of taking time to find the best people possible and then giving them a lot of trust and autonomy. I’m not a micro manager and don’t need to be involved in every decision. I spend a lot of time on recruiting and hiring to ensure the people we’re bringing on are the best for the role and the company. We invest a lot of time on onboarding and alignment on vision and goals once they’re hired. If we do this right, you just need to get out of the way and let them run. I’ve found that leaders can do a lot more damage than good around telling smart, capable people what and how to do things.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I have a Special Advisor, Kevin Mak, who has played a major part in helping Massdrop become what it is today. He has been both one of my greatest challengers and supporters and I’m super grateful for the time he’s spent working with us.

Kevin is a finance professor and even with a full time job, made a ton of time to help us get Massdrop off the ground. We were working out of a house in Palo Alto and Kevin would come by nearly every day to help us with everything ranging from financing strategy and exec recruiting to answering customer support tickets and driving packages to the post office. Basically whatever needed to be done.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

As Massdrop has grown, I’ve been fortunate enough to use my learnings and insights to mentor new entrepreneurs and CEOs. I love being able to help them understand how they can bring their impactful ideas and work to life, avoid potential pitfalls, and ultimately help set them up for success.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I want to make it possible for any person to find and fuel their passions. To spend as much time as possible doing the things they love most. In doing so, I want people to be able to live their best lives, however they define that.