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Culture is one of those factors that is very difficult to quantify, yet incredibly important for success. At companies with great cultures, employees are eager
by paul 12y ago
Culture is one of those factors that is very difficult to quantify, yet incredibly important for success.
At companies with great cultures, employees are eager to show up and get things done because they genuinely care about the team and mission. That was very much my experience at early Google.
Companies with bad cultures try to motivate employees with fear and intimidation, or simply fail to motivate them at all, and everyone wastes their time playing video games or whatever. Not surprisingly, those rarely do well.
In my estimation, most startups have weak to poor culture, which is one reason why you read so many startup horror stories. My advice to anyone looking to join a startup it to pick a place where you are excited about showing up and contributing every day. I think that's a much better predictor of happiness and success than trying to follow the social media hype or hotness signals.
- Alex3917 12y agoIt would be nice to have a coffee table book of startup culture inspiration with a spread for each company with a few office pics and bullet points on what makes their culture unique and successful. Everyone knows about Zappos and Google, but I feel like there are few enough well-known examples that every time I've ever been involved in white boarding on this at various startups we've always come up mostly empty handed.
- n72 12y ago> Companies with bad cultures try to motivate employees with fear and intimidation, or simply fail to motivate them at all, and everyone wastes their time playing video games or whatever. Not surprisingly, those rarely do well. This seems like it could be a chicken or the egg problem though. How do you know that good culture isn't a byproduct of success. If Google stock were tanking, how do you think the culture would look? I honestly don't know.
- paul 12y agoI'm talking about the very early days, so there was no stock to tank, the company was largely unknown and not yet "successful".
- Retra 12y agoI would think -- if you had a culture that wasn't obsessed with making the stock go up -- that you could still operate effectively.
- jnem 12y agoGood question, how was Yahoo's culture between 2010-2012?
- Cakez0r 12y agoOut of curiosity, do you think that passion alone can carry a crappy idea to success? Is it better to be (truly) passionate with a trashy idea or have a solid idea but only be motivated by financial success?