The Culture Code

This is a copy of the CB Insights Culture Code.  In an earlier essay “54 screwups of a startup CEO“, I’d mentioned this culture code and there were lots of requests to see it. So here it is in all of its culture’y glory.

Thanks — Anand (@asanwal)

P.S. If you read this document and think “these folks sound alright” and you’re smart & ambitious, we’re hiring like mad.

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Damn, this was hard.

I know I’d promised something on this a lot earlier but honestly, I’ve struggled with this (a lot). So I apologize for the delay.

My struggle on it has been primarily due to the fact that most things I’ve seen and read of culture sound like relics of a bygone era. They’re useless proclamations about “customer value” and “innovation” which are banal, trite and very corporate.

These are the enemy.

And so I wanted to avoid that.

This is v1 of a culture code. It will evolve over time with your feedback and as we see what works and what doesn’t. Step 1 is defining “the code”. Step 2 will be ensuring our actions, tactics, behaviors, etc are consistent with the code. In essence, ensuring that we walk the talk.

Culture just happens. But leaving it to chance would be reckless.

When we founded CB Insights, I just assumed “culture happens.” Hire great people, build great products, and the right culture will just organically emerge from that, right?

Wrong.

While some kind of culture will definitely emerge on its own, you can’t leave this to chance. Sure, for the first 10 or 15 folks, you might get lucky because everyone’s crammed elbow-to-elbow in the same drab offices, they see the bad months of sales, they take ideas from the whiteboard to product in days, etc. Everyone takes the hits together and everyone pitches in to make it better.

But as you grow to 30 or 100 or 500 employees, it’s just reckless to leave culture to chance.

We were less than 25 at the end of 2014 and just crossed 60 in just 10 months. This growth is awesome (especially since it comes from revenue & profitability) but it also highlighted the importance of culture.

And so we decided that our culture could not be random or accidental, and this Culture Code was born.

What is culture?

Culture is a set of beliefs, values, and practices shared by a group. Think of it as the operating system of the organization.

Why is culture so important for us right now?

We’re scaling. We’ve achieved the elusive “product-market fit,” we did all of last year’s bookings (7 figures) by March of this year, and October 2015 was our best ever.

This was no small feat; 99% of companies don’t get here.  We did this by building  a product that customers want. But ultimately, we’ve only built a fraction of what we’ve imagined, and the reality is that what got us here may not get us to where we want to be.

The right culture will do that.

It will:

• help all of us make better decisions, faster

• guide how we all interact with customers and with each other

• determine what is expected of us and what we can expect from each other

• drive what products we build and what experiments we try

As we keep growing, culture will also help us:

• determine who to hire

• keep the best people

• determine who we should promote

• identify who to let go (this is often neglected in discussions of culture btw)

• optimize for the happiness of our clients and team

Our culture code’s 7 principles

Here are the 7 pillars (fancy word, eh?) or principles that we think are important for our culture.

1. Bias towards action

2. Experiment to win

3. Influence is a function of achievement; not hierarchy

4. Learn and teach to help everyone level up

5. Customers are our investors:  focus on their ROI

6. Humble, helpful and human

7. Value transparency

Biased towards action

Since launching publicly in 2010, we’ve built a solid (but still emerging) brand and business.  What has gotten us here is a focus on execution. We must continue focus on doing.

This means being biased towards action.

We build things that solve problems. This means taking an honest, objective approach to evaluate ideas,then take the initiative to build things that fix what is broken

But solving problems isn’t enough, we also need to…

Experiment to win

Nothing is permanent – not our product, our technology, or what the market needs.

And so we must remain reinvention-focused. And so that means we are a place that values experimentation and tinkering.

Experimentation, on first pass, might seem like something that is product or engineering-centric. Instead we’re talking about a mindset focused on continuous improvement of everything: products, processes, and people.

Experimentation can mean game-changing ideas or just doing little things a little differently. Everything we do from content and marketing to product and biz dev can benefit from some healthy experimentation.

Having a bias towards action and experimenting lets us build better products, make customers happier, and constantly learn.

Those who act and experiment will be recognized because…

Influence is a function of achievement, not hierarchy

With a bias towards action, results are what matter. So a record of getting stuff done and moving the needle is what drives influence – not hierarchy, not raw ideas, and not pontification.

As we grow, we expect that CBI’s future leaders will come from the folks that have shown an ability to achieve (and of course, who want to move into a leadership role).

That brings us to….

Teach and learn to help everyone level up

We will encourage our team to grow in their current roles and dream about what’s next.  Thinking about what’s next means enabling each person to level up and become better at what they do so that they can achieve their goals: learning a new technology, running a project, leading a team, etc.

To help people level up, we provide opportunities for team members to attend events, learn new skills, share their work, and teach one another.

If every member of our team is developing new skills and capabilities, we’ll also become better at serving our customers.

Customers are our investors: focus on their ROI

Being revenue-funded for so long means  that our customers were (and continue to be) our de facto investors. This helped make us fanatical about their Return on Investment (ROI).

How do we deliver the best ROI for our customers? By always thinking about “What’s in it for them?”

This does NOT mean giving away more for less.

It means providing real value and being paid fairly for it. That’s how we’ll build an organization for the long-term. A company with unsustainable economics cannot deliver customer ROI in the long-term; it will be dead.

To deliver client ROI, it’s important to remember that they are not faceless corporations but real people who’ve entrusted us to make their lives easier.

Remembering that we’re serving people means we should always be humble, helpful and human.

Humble, helpful and human

The best people are self-aware and self-critical, not arrogant. Humility doesn’t mean lacking confidence. Humility is about sharing credit when things go well and shouldering responsibility when things don’t.

And when things don’t go well, we are helpful. Whether it be a colleague or a customer, being helpful and human is our default.

Being human also translates to our interactions with each other.  If someone is not getting something and is making an effort to understand, we should work hard to help them get it.

We value transparency

We will make better decisions by sharing information, not hoarding it.

As a result, we provide visibility into

• where we are going

• what we are working on

• how we are doing

• why we’re doing what we’re doing

• the problems and challenges we’re grappling with

This all supports smarter behavior and better decisions.

Again, this is all a work in process. This document and the culture code it contains will evolve over time. We’re doing some things well and some require work.  A lot of what remains to be done are the tactics, processes and rituals that will support and further these principles.  Expect more to come on those.  Without those, these remain simply words on paper.

Thanks for reading.  Lots of work still to do.

Notes:

Beyond the team’s tremendous feedback, a lot of credit for the thinking in this document comes from folks I admire (often from afar) who’ve thought and who’ve probably forgotten more on this topic than I know.  These are folks like Andy Dunn of Bonobos who has written eloquently on this. It also comes from the guys at Hubspot whose culture credo has been an amazing resource.  There are many others I’ve read and borrowed from including some great thought pieces from the First Round Review.