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I'm really conflicted by this article. On the one hand, it's always a shame to read of cases where a company with a great culture which people clearly enjoyed

• soneca 9y ago
  The greatest reason I believe a company should prioritize for cultural excellence is for its causation effect on product excellence. I firmly believe this causation exists and this mutually exclusive scenario you mention doesn't exist.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    But what is "cultural excellence" in the general case? I'd argue that "a really fun place to go into work" and "a place where we are relentlessly focused on creating the best product" could both reflect cultural excellence while still optimizing for different outcomes. [ADDED: I agree with your sibling comment. So long as a business can continue to operate in a manner satisfactory to the owners/management, a variety of different cultures and management styles are perhaps equally valid.]
  • mft_ 9y ago
    Yeah, fair point - perhaps I miswrote, as 'cultural excellence' is too broad a term. For sure, a high-performing company producing a great product needs a great culture to support it. My points are: a) it seems that Meetup tried to optimise their culture for aspects that were not directly related to --and controversially, maybe even opposed to-- product excellence. i.e. their initial version of 'cultural excellence' was more about creating a pleasant inclusive place to work, rather than a productive or high-performing place to work. b) further, if (as a result) your hiring decisions are more guided by prioritising people that will fit into and perpetuate that cultural vision, you're implicitly choosing to not prioritise hiring high-performers. (As said before, it's not mutually exclusive - there may be some high-performers that do fit into your cultural vision... but on a macro scale, if you follow that particular cultural vision, the trend will be away from excellence and performance.)
    • soneca 9y ago
      Put this way, I agree. There is always a risk to lose sight of your final objective and become myopic focusing on more immediately perceived issues. I think I read Paul Graham (or someone from YC) stating that you want diversity of background on your team, but not diversity of objectives. I wholeheartedly agree with this. The more diversity on your team (regarding every dimension: gender, race, nationality, personality traits, education, etc), the more chance you have at building a great product; as long as all of them have unity of vision and goals.
      • Caveman_Coder 9y ago
        I think you hit the nail on the head here. As an anecdotal example, I was hired as a software developer on a team of mostly electrical engineers, and our group develops software/supports the energy management system at a major utility company. Now when I was interviewing, what the team seemed to like the most was my background in actual electric utility operations (I was in the electrical trades for a long time before I figured out that I wanted to study CS). I was the only person on the team with actual operations experience. My boss love it because I could go and talk with the operators, and speak "operator" with them. It made translating their requests into features/upgrades/updates a lot easier for our team, and our customer service improved as a result. By having that background in operations, which was different from the rest of my team, I was able to bring a different perspective, and most importantly, the perspective of our customers to our day to day work.
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  • kelukelugames 9y ago
    There are also a lot of counter examples eg. Investment banking, Uber.
    • hnhg 9y ago
      Investment banking is largely driven by sales, as far as friends in the industry have told me. The company simply needs to support an effective sales culture, not a product one.
  • manquer 9y ago
    While the OP may be wrong in assuming mutually exclusive scenario, the causation effect is not clear either, There are plenty of examples for both kind of cultures creating product excellence and also failing miserably.
  • ihsw2 9y ago
    They're not mutually exclusive but the point is that single-minded ambition towards cultural excellence is a one-way ticket to a rudderless company that has no means of averting disaster. Such a company can only exist in a fantasy land where growth and expansion are always eschewed for social justice.
    • zbentley 9y ago
      Sure, but a single-minded ambition towards product excellence at the expense of cultural excellence creates a company that acts unethically towards its employees and, likely, its consumers/surroundings as well (if it doesn't go out of business due to its cultural problems). That's just as bad as rudderlessness, if not worse. The answer needn't be an extreme, and these discussions needn't consider business success as the sole axis of correctness--ethics should be considered as well, whether or not it has a monetary value.
  • ashelmire 9y ago
    A) what constitutes cultural excellence? I’ve worked in diverse, toxic workplaces, and workplaces that ran extremely well with little diversity (and vice versa). B) your assertion seems to be disproven by the world. Look at the top tech companies with the best products; they are all embroiled in drama with regards to toxic culture one way or another. The market does not seem to select for workplace culture.
    • mattbierner 9y ago
      Studies like the one from project Aristotle (https://nyti.ms/20WG1yY https://nyti.ms/20WG1yY) are a counterpoint. Hire to create the best team, not to create the best lineup of individuals. You only hear about successful teams that have drama because they have drama, not because being a successful team requires drama
  • darkerside 9y ago
    This is wishful thinking. Sometimes these overlap completely. Other times, hopefully rare, there are decisions that favor one result over the other. It's not simply black and white. If what you say were true, optimising for diversity would be totally irrelevant. I don't know if any company that is more racist than it is profit seeking.
• jasonthevillain 9y ago
  The weird part about this article/thread is that the product didn't suck. It did a thing, and it was as good as the groups in your area.
  • sanderjd 9y ago
    Yeah, it hasn't innovated, but it hasn't needed to; it has been a sufficient product since the start and never needed to change much. It's really a shame that I can't immediately bring to mind any stories of companies like Meetup that have a simple product that makes a small amount of money, enough to provide a good living to the small cadre of staff it requires to run it. Maybe Craigslist? Wikipedia, except they're always having to beg for money. I think there may be lots more examples in B2B, but it just doesn't seem like the consumer game lends itself to such companies.
    • ghaff 9y ago
      I would say Craigslist is definitely a good example. What I think happened there is that the Craigslist business model, such as it was, so thoroughly nuked the profitability of the classifieds space (which was a big part of newspapers' bread and butter for years) that it didn't make sense for a next gen competitor to move in--especially given network effects. Maybe Ebay? It got away from its roots and is arguably less good for just about everybody concerned than it used to be. But, again, network effects and no one seems much interested in trying to recreate Ebay 1.0 in all its flea market glory. But, yeah, in general consumer sites that go "OK, it's good enough. We're just going to hang, take long lunch breaks, and keep things going at a just profitable enough level" are going to, sooner or later, be passed by the newer/better/shinier hip kid of the moment.
    • zbentley 9y ago
      MailChimp isn't a bad example. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-the-un-silicon-valley-way-to-make-it-as-a-start-up.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp-and-...
    • fn 9y ago
      Classic example is BaseCamp, née 37signals.
• edmccard 9y ago
  Given the rate of startup failure, and the sheer number of other companies whose "product wasn't there", what reason do we have to believe that hiring a diverse workforce is more relevant than all the other possible reasons for not creating the best possible product?
• zbentley 9y ago
  There's a lot of nuance in the distinction between cultural excellence and product excellence. In IT and a few other fields, a lot of people have come to associate "cultural excellence" with "work is a really fun activity because of perks/getting to do whatever I want/having a very fraternal relationship with all of my colleagues". That's an extreme, and, I think, harmful, spoiled, and incorrect understanding of cultural excellence. When confronted with that that claim (that the perk/fun-based definition of cultural "goodness" is wrong), however, people tend to argue against it from extremes "Are you saying I shouldn't feel good while at work? That I should just tough it out while being abused/overworked/discriminated against? That it's some weird character-building masochistic activity?!" No, of course not. Cultural excellence includes professionalism, compassion, making employees feel valued and rewarded, and making sure they don't feel persecuted or attacked in the workplace. But that's a line that's hard to draw, especially when participants in the conversation are entitled ("well, $big_company_x gives me a ball pit and a nap room, so I think you're stodgy!") or truly threatened ("To me as $underrepresented_demographic_x, any cultural statements short of radical inclusivity and protection sound suspiciously like excuses for discrimination and cultural oppression in the workplace!" --a suspicion that is unfortunately justified quite often). When it comes to product excellence, the nuance and difficulty discussing it comes from the perceived dichotomy between product/cultural values. Valuing cultural quality isn't at odds with product quality unless you do it wrong; a good culture facilitates more ideas, employee growth (an employee who grows makes better contribution to the product), and helps make the structures for acquiring, keeping, and getting rid of employees more fair and productive. However, discussions about that dichotomy often end up with "well we can either not grow or value radical workaholism/Uber-style cults of personality/whatever, so might as well prioritize the product and forget about the irrelevant soft stuff!" That's false, because you need both to succeed. Different strategies might work better or worse depending on what phase of it's life the business is in, or on other factors, but the strategies shouldn't be split into "cultural" and "product". You can't get by with one or the other; thinking about it as a tradeoff is myopic and harmful. TL;DR conversations about culture/product excellence are important to have but tricky to conduct in practice because of misperceptions, participants' prior bad experiences, and the tendency to argue from extremes.
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