How to Build a Strong, Scalable Culture for Blitzscaling

How to Build a Strong, Scalable Culture for Blitzscaling

At this point, almost everyone in the startup world agrees that hiring and culture are important. Whenever these topics arise, it’s almost guaranteed that the discussion will touch on how every Google employee had to interview with Larry and Sergey before receiving an offer, how Zappos offers new employees $1,000 to quit to weed out those who aren’t true believers, and how uber-guru Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” These are inspiring stories and sound bites, but what they fail to do is explain why hiring and culture are so important, and how to manage them as your startup rapidly scales.

As with other key activities, a blitzscaling company has to evolve its approach to hiring and culture; what worked just fine for a company with 5 employees is not likely to be optimal for a company of 500. As you grow, everything from how you find job candidates to what kinds of employees you hire will have to change. In this environment of constant change—both in personnel and organizational structure—you need to develop a coherent culture the organization and its members can rely on to help guide their actions. Hiring and culture go hand in hand because the primary driver of an organization’s culture is the additive effect of the people it hires. And at the same time, the allure of a strong culture is one of the primary tools to help the organization recruit and motivate its people.

Culture is not destiny. It does, however, shape the environment you will be working in for years or decades to come, so choose wisely. Here are some things you need to think about if you want to build a culture that can scale in lockstep with the company:

Be explicit and specific

A coherent culture needs to be specific, rather than simply an accumulation of agreeable platitudes. For example, Steve Jobs famously said, “A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.” It’s a great quote, but saying that your company has a high-performance culture of “A” players doesn’t provide enough useful differentiation. What is an “A” player? Someone who went to the right schools? Worked at the right companies? Can code 10x faster than the average developer? Your culture should attract the talent you want and repel the talent you don’t want. It is better to be loved by a few than liked by a multitude. If your culture doesn’t rule out “A” players who aren’t a good fit, it’s not specific enough.

For example, the two companies I helped start, PayPal and LinkedIn, both had coherent cultures, but were radically different from each other. PayPal was very individualistic, with a lot of emphasis on hiring for high IQ and very little emphasis on hiring for work experience. The company tempo had a frantic pace that tended to be driven by what I’d characterize as “structured panic.” In contrast, LinkedIn’s culture was far more collaborative and patient. We felt that we were seeing something that others didn’t (specifically, the value of a professional social network), and understood that it would take a long time for the world to come around. This meant that we needed to be patient and take multiple shots on goal, while remaining confident that we would eventually succeed. People that fit the PayPal culture tended not to fit the LinkedIn culture, and vice versa.

It’s critical to make sure that this focus on fit doesn’t lead you to create a homogenous, non-inclusive culture. A culture might emphasize high IQ or patience; that’s not the same thing as restricting your hiring to people who have the same background as the founders. Hire people who add to the company’s culture, and who make it easier to hire a diverse workforce at scale.

Be prepared to make tradeoffs

It’s important to note that “bad” cultures can sometimes produce good companies. When it comes to culture, employees ask themselves, “All other things being equal, do I want to keep working here?” The thing is, in most cases, all other things aren’t equal. Many talented people will tolerate a bad culture (i.e., work in an environment in which they’d rather not work) to be part of a winning team. Within Silicon Valley, companies like Oracle, Zynga, Uber, and yes, PayPal have been criticized for their culture, as have companies outside the Valley like Microsoft and Amazon. Those same companies have also defined new industries and created over a trillion dollars in shareholder value.

The ideal, of course, is to build a winning team that people love being on. But the reality is that the pace of blitzscaling sometimes requires trading off employee experience for speed. The key is making these decisions consciously and explicitly, rather than without considering the consequences of the tradeoff. For example, when LinkedIn China was trying to launch an important project, the project leader moved project team into a single hotel so that the team members could work for two weeks at a time without the distractions of everyday life. No one wants to work under such circumstances on a long-basis, but if you’re up front about the tradeoff, they may be willing to do so to achieve a key goal or milestone.

At first, hire generalists over specialists

Frequently, founders are told to focus on building a world-class team. As a result, they seek out experts and specialists. The problem is, specialists tend to be far better suited to mature businesses than startups. Generalists play an important role, even in large companies, but early-stage startups in particular should focus almost entirely on hiring generalists. This doesn’t mean hiring people who lack specific skills or advanced education. “Generalist” isn’t a description of a person’s skills; it’s a description of their capabilities.

Hiring generalists means hiring people who can change directions, refactor priorities, learn something new, and adapt quickly to whatever curveballs the universe throws at them. Part of being a generalist means being aware that trying something new inherently implies making mistakes, and having the resilience to recover rapidly and even more important, learn from those mistakes. A generalist is someone who can do everything from finding a new office to assisting with financing to running partnership negotiations, all the while managing payroll and taking out the trash. A jack (or jill) of all trades is actually a master of adaptability. When you have 10 or fewer people in the organization, everyone has to be a generalist.

Hire for today, worry about tomorrow tomorrow

Another frequent piece of bad advice for early stage startups occurs when well-meaning people tell you to hire employees who can scale with the company. That’s simply wrong. Hiring individual contributors who are great at what they do, but aren’t going to scale into senior roles when the company grows is absolutely fine *if* they’re great at what they do now, what we referred to in our book The Alliance as a tour of duty.

Even if you wanted to, you’re not going to be able to hire people for permanent roles. The team you have now won’t all be with you when you have 10,000+ employees. The senior management team you have now won’t be the same that’s around you when you ring the NYSE bell at your IPO. At LinkedIn, only two of the original 10 employees remain at the company, though the others are enthusiastic and supportive alumni (including me!).

You don’t want to prematurely hire people who are best-suited to the later stages. As the company grows, you’ll be coaching some current employees to take on bigger roles, bringing in new people, and regularly reconfiguring the organization.

Building a strong and productive culture takes work and commitment on the part of the founders, but it is a key success factor for blitzscaling. Blitzscaling means throwing out many of the conventional rules of business; this aggressive approach can leave many wondering what they should and should not do. When your company is doubling or tripling in size every year, a strong culture acts as the centripetal force that maintains strategic and tactical coherence between the many people and initiatives that are driving growth.

This essay is adapted from the planned Blitzscaling Playbook. To learn more about why, when, and how to blitzscale your organization, visit Blitzscaling.com to order your copy of our book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies.

Tu Le

Accountant at Nam cường

4y

Thanks you, thousands like.

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Tarun Chugh

Vice President Of Product & Delivery

5y

Thanks for providing valuable inputs...

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Arsalan K.

Author | Speaker | Advisor | Blogger on Business and Digital Transformation

5y

#culture is the most important factor for any organization and it has many aspects to it. Here’s how https://www.google.com/amp/s/arsalankhan.com/2016/02/19/5-questions-to-ask-about-your-culture/amp/

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Srikrishnan Sundararajan ☁️ Your Cloud and Digital Reinvention Partner

Partner - Cloud, Digital Strategy, Transformation Consulting, FinOps, SRE, Gen AI. Advisory, Value Realization, Migration, Modernisation, Innovation and Managed Services

5y

Awesome article on culture as the centripetal force while scaling startups. FYI Digbijoy Shukla Sandeep Kashyap Shailesh Albuquerque

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