How to fit into startup culture
Everything's broken, bro
A lot of startups are founded by really smart, innovative people who are very good at building new products, but not necessarily so good at running large companies; so as their organisations grow, they hire managers from more mature companies to do that. If you’re one of those managers, you may sometimes feel like
If you feel like that, this post is for you: it will show you how to talk and act to fit right in.
Start claiming that everything is ‘broken’
If you’ve worked for long-established companies, you’re probably used to going after small, incremental gains: things work pretty well already, and your job is to make them just a tiiiiiny bit better. Now that you’ve joined a start-up, though, that’s not an acceptable worldview. To truly fit in a start-up environment, you need to start believing the world looks like this:
According to startups, banking is broken; payments are broken; fiat currency is broken; shipping is broken; so are farming, transportation, mobility, education, law, construction, medicine, media, wholesale, retail, B2B, B2C, B2B2C, B2B2B, advertising, film production, film distribution, instant messaging, email, social networking, anti-social networking, and everything in-between.
You might feel such language is grossly exaggerated. That doesn’t matter. That’s the language you need to learn to speak now.
Fetishise industry
A psychology grad student could write a thesis on why people who write code, deal in pixels, and create intangible assets borrow the language of industrial production.
PMs, designers, and software engineers do not write programs, they ‘build’; they do not deploy or upload, they ‘ship’; they do not try or test, they ‘tinker’. Code does not live in a database or drive, it lives in ‘warehouses’. Honestly, I’ve worked in a factory, and I heard these words less often then than I do now.
You may find the idea of an office employee sipping matcha tea at their standing desk talking like a greasy-elbowed blue-collar worker baffling. But does it matter? The thing to do is to introduce even more manufacturing terms to tech — TQM, loss analysis, SKU, zero-defects, JIT, &c &c.
Embrace chaos
Tech companies are very upfront about the fact their workplaces are chaotic and are looking for people who are fine with that — Google, for instance, values people who ‘thrive in ambiguity’ . They are less honest about the fact that this chaos stems not from the external environment in which they operate, but from their own way of doing things.
Coming from a company with a long history and established processes, your instinct will be to try to impose some order. Be warned that nine times out of ten, this will backfire. “Should we create a standard process for making decisions — e.g. meet weekly to review proposals?” you will ask. “Absolutely not, processes are stifling innovation and slow us down”, you will be told. “But… I’m finding it slower to get things done when I have to find time in 10 different stakeholders’ calendar…” you will venture, more timidly now. “You need to learn to thrive in ambiguity”, you will be scolded.
“Should we set clear criteria for making decisions?” you will suggest on another occasion. “Our industry is too complex for applying universal criteria”, you will be told (you will elicit this response even if your start up operates in an ancient industry, say insurance or advertising, just with a nicer front-end). “So how do we make decisions?” you will ask. “You need to learn to influence stakeholders” you will be taught.
So shift your mindset away from process-driven improvement and towards making friends and influencing people.
Hire like there’s no tomorrow
(This piece of advice was valid up to a month ago from the time of writing; you should probably be a little more cautious with it over the coming months.)
Coming into the world of tech and start-ups, you may have a few misconceptions vis-a-vis hiring practices. You may think that start-ups are lean, their employees overworked. You may believe they have flat hierarchies. Perhaps you’re under the impression most people work on tech. No, no, and no. To fit in, you need to understand the following:
Start-ups want to boast of having large workforces, because that makes them appear successful. Traditional companies are measured on profit improvement, and fund their operations primarily through retained earnings or debt (both of which require them to be profitable), so they have an incentive to employ as few people as possible. Start-ups are measures on revenue growth, and have easy access to money thanks to an overabundance of VC capital. Individual managers within start-ups also have incentives to hire people — your LinkedIn looks better if you can claim you manage 10 people instead of 2.
For the same reason, hierarchies are not flat — it may look good on your CV to have a team of 10 reporting to you, but that’s a lot of work — 1:1s and appraisals alone will take up a lot of your time. So, you hire 2 people under you to manage the rest — problem solved: you now lead an organisation. This is how even small tech companies have a CPO, 1–2 Product VPs, several Product Directors, a few Principal Product Managers, and more product managers.
Most start-ups start with a product idea, which suggests founders are usually technically-minded people. If you’re a technically minded person, and want to hire someone to manage your business, what do you do? You look up ‘who is good at business’. The answer is ‘HBS’, ‘McKinsey’, ‘Goldman Sachs’. These are great institutions, but their people do not have actual experience running a business — they know how to provide advice and create strategy blueprints. So, you hire an HBS/McKinsey/GS alum, who goes on to staff teams of ‘strategists’ and ‘special projects managers’. These people are used to working 100hr weeks, and can produce an incredible amount of strategy papers and decks; their work scales linearly with their number, and because their work appears impressive, their managers hire more and more of them. In contrast, engineers’ work does not scale linearly — if you want to build a particular feature, hiring 10 more engineers to work on it won’t necessarily speed up development (it may actually impede it). So you may well end up with a disproportionate number of non-eng people in your company.
Now that you understand the incentives and dynamics at play, you know what to do: start writing proposal after proposal on why you need more people in your team. You’ll be surprised at how many of them get accepted (especially if you’ve successfully embraced and learned to operate in chaos).
Talk like an American
In many industries, it pays to be a cynic. Not so in start-up-land. Here, there is no such thing as a stupid idea. Even the age-old adage, ‘if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything’ doesn’t apply — you have to be outspokenly enthusiastic about everything anyone may be working on.
The British are not used to talking like this, which is why the start-up ecosystem and VCs have been slow to take off here, but things are changing — and if you want to succeed, you need to be part of that change.
These are enough to get you started!
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