Culture is Risky.

A post I wrote a few years back on culture.

You can pivot a product but you can’t pivot culture.

A few weeks ago I was asked by the Made in NY Media Center in Dumbo to take part in their Culture Shift symposium. They wanted to know about the culture at betaworks and how we are able to consistently produce successful start-ups. This is the talk I gave. It’s mostly about music.

You have to know why you exist as a business. In the most unpredictable of worlds your business culture is the one thing you can stick to. It’s fine to have a culture about making money, so long as everyone agrees to that. In an ideal world a business where everyone is happy will be more productive and make money.

There is a big difference between long term and short term thinking around culture. This is Andrew Weatherall an English ‘Techno’ (LONG STORY) producer and artist. His current radio show is called ‘Music is Not For Everyone’ but that’s also his philosophy on culture.

He first started DJing around 1987. His first remixes appeared a few years later. In 1990 he produced Loaded, Primal Scream’s breakthrough hit and Screamadelica, their seminal album. He also remixed My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’. It seems obvious now, but he was the first person to mix indie guitar music with dance music. He made some money from Screamadelica, because back then people bought records.

He could have continued in that vein. Other DJs like Paul Oakenfold made a lot of money remixing terrible rock bands like U2. But Weatherall has always steered clear of the mainstream. Another song that netted him some cash, was ‘Smokebelch’ by his 1990’s band “Sabres of Paradise’. This perfect piece of ambient house was used on countless commercials and collections. He could have continued in that vein but he didn’t. He already had tattoos in 1990. His arms read, ‘Fail we may. Sail we must’. Basically, Olde English start-up speak. I wanted to be like him when I was 17 but even I knew tattoos were for ‘bad people’.

Smokebelch and Screamadelica were probably the only things that ever made him any money. Through the years he could have embraced every aspect of Dance Music. But nearly 40 years later he set up a 7 inch vinyl subscription service called Moine Dubh. It loses money, but he likes the idea of people in the digital age having a real artifact. He also does the artwork using woodcuts and etching I believe. It’s mostly super weird folk music like this amazing track by Barry Woolnough.

Another recent experiment is Convenanza, a small music festival in a castle in the South of France. Weatherall could easily play Coachella or any big festival, he is an amazing DJ. Any of the big DJs like James Murphy or Steve Aoki would say he is an influence on them. But he chooses to play music for about 1000 dedicated and deliriously happy fans rather than 10,000.

Recently he was in NY. He played a 10 hour DJ set in Brooklyn for Resolute. He finished at 9am. I was going to get up at 7am and go for the last two hours but I chickened out. He also did a show on Tim Sweeney’s Beats in Space WNYU radio show. The text on his polaroid for Tim’s show reads: ‘If you’re not living on the edge…you’re taking up too much space”. More classic start-up speak.

So what’s that got to do with companies, start-ups and culture? What it means to me is that you can’t be all things to all people — but if you can get a hard core of a thousand fans that love you — then you can have a pretty great existence. And isn’t that what we want?

It also says to me that you have to be different. The debate will go on about this guy for years but the main story for creative people like me is that to get really big, to get ‘BIG LY’, to really breakout — like Snapchat breakout — you have to be different. Some people will love you, some people will hate you. But that’s OK.

What you can’t do is force culture. You have to be true to yourself. So Andrew Weatherall has stuck to a passion of weird records and the other guy, my boss, John Borthwick, has stuck to his passion of building experiments. The culture of betaworks comes from him. (Really I just wanted to get Weatherall, Shakespeare and Borthwick on the same slide).

This is the core idea. It’s simple once it’s explained. You build something, you put it out there, you see what people like about it, what they don’t like and then you make decisions. This is a process that works.

This idea works right now — because the world has gone mad, mental, as we say in London. You cannot reasonably predict anything any more so a culture of experimentation is all the more important.

We had a saying a while back — ‘Fuck It Ship It’ — that fairly, or unfairly, we got known for. This is a poster attributing the phrase to us. It’s not one we made. Fuck It Ship It — does not mean it doesn’t matter. It means, we don’t have time to be perfect. The phrase I prefer is ‘minimum lovable product’. There has to be something, at least one thing, that people love about your product prototype. That’s part of our culture — would anyone really love this product?

It’s hard to make breakout products. The odds are against you. I wrote this in 2013 and I believed it. And yet in New York there is a company that just recently announced a big raise that puts it pretty close to being the next Instagram. Hands up who knows what that company is?

Clever you, that’s right, Giphy. I assume you all know what Giphy is. But let me tell you how it started. Alex Chung was working at betaworks on another product but wanted a gif for a presentation. There was nothing, he built it — along with Jace Cooke and the rest is history. 100 million DAUs. He was in the same batch of ‘Hackers in Residence’ as Patrick Moberg who made Dots — now closing in on 200 million downloads. Dots is the first game he ever made. John Borthwick thought he would make a good game — got him to make an experiment. Poncho has been slower — because it was hard to scale the one-on-one relationship with a cat that gives you the weather. But as soon as chatbots became real we did that and sure enough, Poncho is now the most popular bot on Facebook. Dexter — our latest experiment is a platform that allows anyone to build a bot — in a simple elegant way. It combines some of the ease of Squarespace with the marketing analysis of Mailchimp. If you want a bot, come talk to me.

The betaworks culture allows us to think big and be open. We are not secretive. We just finished a podcast about working here that was a huge success. I think mainly because we were honest about what goes on here. Our newsletter is called Openbeta — we believe the more people that play with our shit, the better it will get. But it’s not a scattergun approach — once we have something we get laser focused on it — that’s why Giphy is winning — they own gifs. Right now we are focused on AI / Bots / Voice interface and how this technology will affect the next few years of product development.

So we have a culture of risk. We make long term bets that need to come off. We have no regular paychecks. But if they do we win big and that pays for the next round of experiments. If a product doesn’t work we kill it. But we are in it together. It’s a group risk. If you are part of the team on a product that didn’t work — we’ll find you another job in the studio or larger network.

But how about the risk for you? I’ve always thought it’s interesting that your salary is called compensation. And I think you should look at it like that. You are being compensated for spending the best part of your life working on something. The risk is that this is time wasted.

I used to work in Advertising. It took me while to find the right place in London — when I did, it was fantastic, I ran the creative department with a my great friend Flo Heiss, we made great work and it eventually sold for $50m. It also took me a long time to find the right place in New York. Which I always knew would be outside of advertising. I — rightly — got fired from my last big Advertising Job. Which was the best thing that ever happened to me. You have to spend time finding the right culture. I believe talented people will bounce until they find the right culture. If it’s important to them, then it has to be your no 1 priority as a founder. You can pivot a product but you can’t pivot culture.

Ok, thanks. Toodles.

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If you want more. Read ‘Remember Fucked Company? It’s Time to play Fucked Country.