Sonder

Culture of a Company

Point in time snapshot of my thoughts on a company’s culture.

As I try to understand the world of entrepreneurship, I’m getting more clarity on what matters. A younger me would have scoffed at the thought of a startup’s culture, but now I see what the true importance of a startup’s culture is.

A quote I know on culture I first heard from Ben Horowitz of a16z: “Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there”1. My understanding is, culture is the foundation of a startup, after the company reaches a point in time T. T is tough to define; but I think its the moment where you get your first hire who you as a founder cannot directly monitor - this point in time varies for each startup.

In this vein, the first piece of the puzzle is to have an overarching mission. It’s the theme under which people would want to come together in the first place. Rallying towards a common important goal gets humans to coordinate - thank Homo Sapiens for that feature. You could be predicting the next video to improve content engagement or build an AGI23 - pick one that matters to you more.

Next piece is defining your values. When your OKRs seem to reflect that two roads at a fork are both equally important to pursue, your company’s values show you the correct path - the one which aligns better. Once defined it becomes the founder’s responsibility to consciously align their decision making to their company’s values (or the other way around, depending on how strongly established the values are). And this goes not just for you, it goes for everyone in the company.

And that’s why culture is a two sided coin. The beauty of culture - you set expectations for each decision without micromanaging expectations. The beast - any decisions you make misaligned with your own framework, expect it to be punished. You see, there are 2 parts to culture - values and behaviour. If you can define your values but don’t abide by them, you set the tone for the rest to follow in your foot steps. That’s the punishment; your discipline(or lack thereof) is mimiced by the rest of the company.

My personal addendum to this discussion is a view I haven’t yet come across: values should be listed in a priority order. I think this creates clarity on which action to pursue and how well aligned things ACTUALLY are. If you can’t order them, that’s okay, but know what that could mean for your company - the most difficult, pressing decisions come down to random chance. That’s a gamble not many are willing to take.

It’s been a bit of a hobby for me to think about what values I would like embibed in a company of my own. I came up with a few I want to share.

  1. Uphold Integrity and attempt to be a force of good.3
  2. Acknowledge the shifting ground truth and change course if that is what is needed.
  3. Reliability of efforts, if you say you’re going to do something, do it.
  4. Bite Sized » Big Bang, be it any dimension of the product.

It’s a work in progress, but I feel good about this set. Most of it is derived from my personal experiences, so it could be a bad idea to structure a company along these lines. I think this appropriately prioritizes what’s important to me as the founder of a company.

Have some thoughts? Email me :)

  1. https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/ben-horowitz-culture-corporate-book ↩

  2. Neither is superior unfortunately. ↩

  3. A force of good in one realm is often the opposite in another, which makes this difficult. ↩ ↩2