\u201cI think one of the most important jobs of the founder is to align everybody on the same culture, and prune out those who don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cCulture is the soul of a company – it\u2019s not what the company says it is, it\u2019s what it actually does,\u201d says Luis Garza<\/a> (FN July \u201815). He launched his second company, Kinedu<\/a>, a parenting and child development startup, two years ago. The leadership tips he has to offer other founders certainly draw on his training at Stanford and then Harvard Business School. But it was leading his first company, ADVENIO, through growth across Latin America and partnership with HSBC, citi and other major companies that he really learned how this kind of tactical advice can make a difference for entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n \u201cCulture is something that you just do, not a strategy that you think out and implement. You have to respond on the fly,\u201d Garza says of early stage decisions that add up to a company culture long before a team might have offsites, release swag or the structured \u201ctells\u201d of a company working on it\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no one right \u201cculture\u201d a founder can read up on and lock in on her first month. Culture is how we show up at work \u2013 who we are and how we behave when we\u2019re on the clock. How do leaders treat employees and customers. Who do they promote, and why \u2013 most of these decisions are unconscious signals of culture, in the sense that they are reactive.<\/p>\n \u201cCulture is spilling down from the founder\u2019s core beliefs, so what the CEO does is basically replicated,\u201d Garza says.<\/p>\n Paul Caswell of Weave the People leads roundtable discussions on bringing intention to your startup culture.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cWhen I started, I knew what I didn\u2019t want \u2013 No \u2018us vs. them\u2019 between different disciplines, sales vs. engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s no such thing as a culture-free workplace \u2013 it\u2019s just either intentional, or accidental, notes Paul Caswell<\/a> (FN April\u201915). He founded Weave the People<\/a> to create technical tools focused on office culture and engagement, and they work with corporations (latest partner: Comcast) who see connection within their people as key to their bottom line.<\/p>\n \u201cAs founders, we get to shape culture the same way we direct products and services,\u201d Caswell says. \u201cIt\u2019s who we are when we show up at work \u2013 how we work and the environment we invite people to show up to.\u201d<\/p>\n Founders Edge asked a group of founders who\u2019d seen one or more companies through the early stages of growth and fundraising how they learned to make intentional choices about company culture. They shared advice for entrepreneurs who are starting or reevaluating a company\u2019s core values on:<\/p>\n “It\u2019s the same team \u2013 the same company,” Domingo Guerra<\/a> (FN May \u201812) says. He spent his first 11 months at mobile security startup <\/span>Appthority<\/a> on a team with just his two cofounders. Before they raised more than $10 million for this venture, they\u2019d come from huge companies \u2013 Intel, McAfee, Brocade \u2013 and they all had war stories to share of what they DIDN\u2019T want to build in their new environment.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe got to learn what\u2019s painful, what\u2019s enjoyable \u2013 and that shaped things unintentionally,\u201d Guerra reflects. Appthority\u2019s culture had started before the company did \u2013 in what the founders brought to the table. \u201cTrust and teamwork go hand-in-hand. Difficult decisions make you go back to your core values.\u201d<\/p>\n The learning process as founders stumble, test and confirm who they are and what the company will be doesn\u2019t happen in a vacuum. Or at least, it shouldn\u2019t, Garza saw as he grew from young founder in Mexico to serial entrepreneur.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve learned in my time as an entrepreneur how many challenges we have \u2013 but so many people have helped me on the way and are willing to lend a hand,\u201d Garza says.<\/p>\n \u201cI try to be as open as I can because I think it is the right thing to do. I feel that it is my duty to pay back, and share my experiences and thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n FOUNDER TURNED VC DAN HOFFER OF TANDEM CAPITAL SHARES PERSPECTIVE ON STARTUP CULTURE FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TABLE.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cFind a distinctive culture where you can talk with openness and trust about the issues you\u2019re facing \u2013 a place where there\u2019s just founders.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Founders Network member-turned-Investor Dan Hoffer<\/a>, who recently joined Tandem Capital<\/a>, says he thinks entrepreneurs seek out communities like Founders Network for the honesty possible in private, direct mentorship. He has direct experience \u2013 he cofounded Couchsurfing, which scaled \u2013 while bootstrapped \u2013 to over 3 million members and then raised a $22.6 million in two funding rounds.<\/p>\n \u201cAt this point, the mainstream media has documented the pressure everyone is under to say things are going great,\u201d Hoffer says. A leader has to find places that allow for frank analysis of what does and doesn\u2019t work as you\u2019re building a work world.<\/p>\n Once you get the founders talking, off the record, about what works and what sucks, what do they say about building culture? FN\u2019s funded founders shared a list of key ingredients that each seemed small \u2013 sometimes downright humble. But each small action flags the overarching values behind it, and add up to workplaces where you want to be.<\/p>\n Sharing tactical moves that have worked (and not), founders listed three areas they\u2019ve learned to target \u2013 not always easily:<\/p>\n Modest traditions build to powerful effects<\/b><\/p>\n Domingo Guerra (Left) shares how small things can make a big difference over time.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cPut birthdays on a recurring calendar. You do it once on hire, and don\u2019t really have to think about.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cThings that are small build up,\u201d Guerra says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be really structured, but you make a habit out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Guerra\u2019s team at Appthority, which grew from 3 to almost 30, gathers around a long table for lunch a few times a week. They hold \u201cbrown bag\u201d lunch events when someone has a skill to share \u2013 one week, a coworker brought in a pile of locks and taught picking to the team.<\/p>\n Not every startup looks like a Silicon Valley office, with kegerators and team shirts. Garza\u2019s Mexican team doesn\u2019t really identify that way (and investors frown on it, he noted) – but that doesn\u2019t mean Kinedu lacks company culture. They just made their own.<\/p>\n \u201cWe rent out a classroom at the university as our office space, and we have students randomly walking in and asking what we\u2019re doing,\u201d Garza says. \u201cWe painted the walls with idea paint so you can draw on them, there\u2019s music playing in the afternoons, and outside people playing soccer or having talent shows. It\u2019s different than the traditional office space, and we really like it.\u201d<\/p>\n The only way to care about people is to know their lives \u2013 to talk to them<\/b><\/p>\n Javier Renom Portet (Center) shares his experience fostering startup culture among a distributed team.<\/p><\/div>\n “This is not just saying something appreciative \u2013 it\u2019s looking again and challenging the person being seen. It creates a culture of \u2018we can do more. I see this in you, bring it out.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Xavi (Javier) Renom Portet<\/a> (FN April \u201813) put empathy above all other values when he weighed in on the culture conversation from his experience founding Justinmind<\/a>, a web and mobile prototyping tool with over 1 million users.<\/p>\n \u201cHave real interest \u2013 if you don\u2019t care, you will have a problem keeping people happy. All the other things are corporate culture,\u201d Portet says. \u201cIf you really care about someone, the other person feels that.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Caswell – the Weave The People founder – experienced this as a technical team leader before he turned entrepreneur. He saw first hand how product can fall apart if there’s a cultural blindspot.<\/p>\n \u201cAs an enterprise architect, I was working on $20 million projects with great architecture, and many of them were failing. I realized it wasn\u2019t a technology issue, it was a people issue,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cI was focused on the technical vision \u2013 if we have clear roles and responsibilities, what\u2019s stopping us? No one had taken time to really see the people,\u201d Caswell says. \u201cIt\u2019s not an easy thing to appreciate somebody, and it\u2019s actually quite humbling for the person looking.”<\/p>\n Several of the FN founders and partners who participated in the culture conversation say they build structured time into stand-ups and one-on-ones to talk directly about not just performance, but value and recognition. As Caswell puts it:<\/p>\n Transparency builds trust<\/b><\/p>\n Diego Villarreal Meyer (Center) of Banter! emphasizes the importance of a strong relationships among the founding team.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cIf we hadn\u2019t had mutual respect we wouldn\u2019t have made it through. There\u2019s never enough communication \u2013 sharing emotions and thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cWhen we ran out of runway, we were hanging from a very thin thread and had to rely on each other,\u201d Diego Villarreal<\/a> (FN August \u201814) recalls of early days as a founder. His startup Banter!<\/a>, is a nightlife app.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no second chance at trust with customers, either, Guerra added. Working on a security startup at Appthority, putting data protection first requires turning down opportunities that are too risky \u2013 even when it is painful. Openly acknowledging the values that drive your decision making gives context to a tough decision.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople follow and react to how the founder is doing things,\u201d Garza says of his team in Mexico. \u201cIt\u2019s not just setting the goals and compensations, but making your actions accessible to the organization.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI try to share a lot of what we are doing with my direct reports and ask them how they would react. It\u2019s a mentoring process, but also an alignment \u2013 what are the right goals, and how we\u2019re going to get there.<\/p>\n To scale culture as you grow, use teams as culture units<\/b><\/p>\n Laurence Morgan of CBRE explains how office space and culture interact.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cThere are some core values that never change, and they start to show themselves as your company progresses.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Human nature doesn\u2019t change even as companies transform \u2013 people want to feel valued, responsible, and as though they have opportunity to grow. But how a leader prioritizes those values changes as a company scales from a few founders to multiple teams and even multiple cities or countries.<\/p>\n Maintaining culture on a team by team basis is the only way to scale, as Portet (who founded Justinmind) sees it \u2013 and companies have made their reputations for it, Google for the better, and Oracle for the worse.<\/p>\n Very early stage companies sometimes effectively outsource some of that culture-building by finding incubators, investors and coworking spaces that offer day-to-day impact as well as funding.<\/p>\n At Hoffer\u2019s seed stage investment company, Tandem, invites companies to use their office space for a 6-month period dedicated to collaboration. In-house growth hackers, designers and product people work with the founders \u2013 as do Tandem\u2019s investors, who take on only 3 companies at a time.<\/p>\n \u201cCulture within small teams differs and that\u2019s great \u2013 you want sales to be driven to get the customer, and technology to be driven by quality,\u201d Garza says. \u201cThe same principle applies to starting teams in different countries.\u201d<\/p>\n You want a local team with local knowledge, who knows how to navigate the landscape and market.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to give them the freedom to do things differently,\u201d Garza says, \u201cBut ultimately they\u2019re doing it for the same reason – working towards one goal. For us, that\u2019s to serve parents better than everybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Paul](\"http:\/\/foundersnetwork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Paul-Caswell.jpg\")
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