HUMANS of 1776: Harnessing the Power of Culture within a Startup for Startups
At what point in a company’s lifecycle do you focus on culture? Sweat gets you funded. Clients make you a business. Culture drives your growth.
For 1776, it was time. Time to focus on aligning the vision, team and goals. Time to transition from a scrappy, young startup to a grown-up global company. And time to hire me to help make it all happen.
That was 90 days ago today, and I’ll tell you what the journey has been like so far.
For starters, I am not traditional HR. I don’t come from an HR background, and most people tell me I’m unlike anyone they’ve ever worked with in HR. HR mitigates risks; I make sure we can take them. At the same time, I’m not the anything-goes, no-rules culture czar that has infected so many wannabe companies. I believe ping-pong tables are not culture, perks won’t make or break a company, and some rules make sense.
Four years ago, the startup scene in DC was haphazard. It was more than the land that created AOL, but not by much. It didn’t have a clear identity, and you had random pockets of accelerators and angel investors and the omnipresent shadow of global political power.
Doors opened for 1776 on January 30, 2013 with four full-time employees, including serial entrepreneurs, visionaries and cofounders: Evan Burfield and Donna Harris. The DC campus quickly became the hub for innovation in DC, and entrepreneurs descended on the campus to work on disrupting highly regulated industries. One of the best parts was that you wouldn’t know when Richard Branson or POTUS would walk through the doors. And they both did.
Four years later, 1776 has four major campuses, almost 50 employees around the world and has worked with over 1,000 startups. BUT four years later, the startup scene in DC and in the world has drastically changed.
There’s a WeWork on every corner as co-working space becomes a commodity. Traditional venture investments are slowing yet accelerator programs are launching left and right. For entrepreneurs, the only significant exit has been Brexit. To say political power has shifted would be an understatement. And new technologies are moving from the lab to the home faster than sectors or regulations can keep up.
Against this new backdrop, what purpose does 1776 serve? These challenges drew me to 1776, and this context drives the need for culture.
Over the last 90 days, I’ve taken a journey at 1776 examining its three dimensions of organizational culture: people, place and processes. Here’s what I uncovered:
PEOPLE
In my first week, I initiated the proverbial listening tour but with a critical twist: I engaged with our staff but also our most important stakeholders— our startups and their founders. What I discovered was that our culture is interwoven with the success of our startups.
Also in my first week, we had a major leadership change as Evan became the sole CEO. Donna and Evan launched 1776 together and developed a unique partnership as cofounders and co-CEOs — two strategic thinkers and two tacticians meant the company could grow twice as fast, and that was a big part of the 1776 secret sauce. To see this change just as I entered the picture was at first a bit unsettling. But as I met with Donna and Evan and the entire team, I marveled at how they put excellence and success (of 1776 and our startups) ahead of egos or personal gain.
Establish A New Leadership Team
With Evan taking the solo helm of 1776, we added additional talent to the executive team and promoted people to new leadership roles. Now Evan is complemented by Peter Cherukuri (President and Chief Innovation Officer), Steve Graubart (Chief Financial Officer), Yuriko Horvath, (Chief Technology Officer), Ned Jaroudi (Managing Director for the Middle East & North Africa), Rachel Haot (Managing Director for the New York Region) and me… with more to come. The entire executive team has deep experience within media, technology and government, and our future rests at the intersection of these sectors.
Hire New Global Talent
In just my first 90 days, we hired seven new team members in five cities across five different teams. Cameron Bard from the New York Governor’s Office and Ryan O’Toole from the Virginia Governor’s Office joined to lead regional market development. Mike Alpert-Appell joined our growing engineering team after graduating from the FlatIron School. Camille Hoisington from Urban Future Labs and Tarek Ghobar from HelloFood USA joined to lead startup programming in NYC and Dubai respectively. Claudia Mortimer from STEP Conference joined to manage our Dubai campus, and Carolyn Harrold joined us from SxSW Eco to run our global pitch competition, Challenge Cup.
And while every growing organization experiences exciting gains in talent, it also inevitably experiences turnover in existing staff. 1776 is four years old, and as I’ve seen in my previous roles with companies at this juncture, some team members are ready to move on. In those past roles, I’ve also often seen team members move on to start their own companies as startups tend to attract and develop future entrepreneurs. That’s held true here at 1776 as some team members have left to launch their own endeavors. We know we’re doing it right when they believe in the entrepreneurs in themselves!
PLACES
Where we work plays a critical role in how we perform. I’m actually writing this post from our campus in Dubai, as part of my first trip to this region with 1776. Before I came on board, I had a sense of a global startup community but to see it first-hand is inspiring. We designed our Dubai campus from the ground up to reflect the regional opportunity, and we infused it with key 1776 elements. Over the next few weeks, we have the opportunity to take this approach to another city as we embark on a multi-million dollar investment in a permanent 30,000 square foot campus in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The key thread with both campuses is that they are unique gathering places for startups working with highly complex institutions ranging from government to corporations to universities.
We are also re-examining the role of our older campuses and how to re-engineer them to be as intentional as possible in making critical connections so startups and institutions can innovate together.
While giving people a place to work remains an element of our strategy, we’ve moved away from solely focusing on co-working. Space is an important part of building innovation communities, and fortunately there are hundreds of spaces and startup communities sprouting all around the world.
Our true “place” in the startup ecosystem is to bring these disparate communities together into a global startup ecosystem of entrepreneurs, mentors, investors and innovative institutions. And what I’ve learned in my first 90 days is that 1776 has actually been working on doing this through our proprietary software platform, Union. By creating a platform for these communities to come together, Union has fundamentally changed all of the processes, workflow and outcomes for 1776.
PROCESS
They say “necessity is the mother of invention,” and that encapsulates the origin story of Union. Out of necessity, two years ago we created a simple platform to address the administrative burden of managing a campus. We quickly realized a larger opportunity to reimagine all the processes with which we operated as a company to maximize the value of our community of startups and institutions. We also soon discovered our challenges were the same as other startup communities around the world — ranging from improving the logistical functions of a campus to ensuring mentors and resources were being utilized and leveraged effectively to help entrepreneurs and startups succeed.
We have built a product and engineering team focused on developing our platform, and we now have an entire team dedicated to licensing our Union platform to incubators and accelerators around the world. While more announcements will come on this front, Union is the one of the big bets we have made as a company, and that is transforming the identity of 1776 and its overall culture.
I’m proud of the progress I’ve made already in getting to know 1776, its people, places and processes. I also know I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface of how these pieces can come together and what they can do. We are at a unique moment in history, and the mission of 1776 is more important than ever!
