How to Start a Startup - Lecture 10 Notes

I’m taking down notes for Sam Altman’s class, How to Start a Startup and I figured I’d start sharing them. This is for the tenth lecture with the following notes:

Building Culture

What is Company Culture?

• Everyday (a) and (b) for each member of the team in pursuit of our company (c).
  • (a) = assumptions, beliefs, values, core values
  • (b) = behaviours, actions
  • (c) = goals, bhag (big hairy audacious goal), mission.

Why is matters?

• First Principles that you go back to when you make decisions.
• Alignment people to values that matter to the company.
• Stability to fall back on.
• Trust each other with.
• Exclusion

• Retention

• It takes time to come up with a set of culture values that the company believes in.
• Took a year to ask employees what core values they wanted and bring it down to 10.
• Everyone says we want honest, service, team work, etc.
• Instil the idea that it’s company first, department, team and then yourself.

Elements of high performing teams

• Trust you can actually have debates if you have conflict and debate.
• Conflict if you don’t have conflict and debate, it’s just the blind leading the blind
• Commitment people are not willing to commit then.
• Accountability people are not held accountable to things they committed to
• Results you can’t get results then.

Best practices

• Incorporate your mission to your values
• Perforamnce - think harder, deeper, longer
• Interview for culture fit (!)
• Evaluate performance on culture
• Make it a daily habit - if you don’t you eventually stop doing it and the company slowly dies

Q/A with Brian (Airbnb)

Q. The process by which you came to realize that culture was important?

Ans.

• Airbnb was supposed to be the idea to pay the rent to think of the big idea.
• We were lucky to have a team that were up to your level (see lecture 9 notes).
• Founders are like parents
  • The company is the children: it’s up to the “parents” to set the right attitude.
  • You would want your child to endure and out live you.
• Core values learned:
  • Behaviours that change over time
  • Some principles that never change.

Q. How long did it take you to hire your first employee?

Ans.

• First employee was the first engineer.
• Interviewed for 4 months.
• Your first engineer was bringing in DNA to your company
  • There would be a 1000 people like this person.
  • Do I want to work with 1000 of this kind of people
  • You want diversity of backgrounds, age, etc.
    • You don’t want diversity of values

Q. What are Airbnb’s values?

Ans.

1. Champion the mission - we want to hire people for the mission.
2. Be creative & frugal (better to watch this bit with the stories)

Q. How does having a story culture helped you make strong decisions?

Ans. Three things no one tells you about culture:

1. No one ever tells you about culture
2. It’s hard to measure
3. It doesn’t pay off in the short-term

• Interview for World Class & they fit the culture.

Q. Culture and brand were two sides of the same coin. Talk about branding for a bit.

Ans.

• There’s no such thing as a good or bad culture. A culture that’s good for someone doesn’t necessarily have to be a good culture for you.
• Brand is the connection between you and customers. If you have a really strong culture, the brand will come through.

Q. How did you communicate what Airbnb does in the early days?

Ans.

• Early days, we communicated like a utility - it’s a cheap alternative to hotels.
  • This under-cut the ideas.
• Did a lot of story telling.
• Articulate the vision over and over again.

Q. How do we make sure the hosts are re-enforcing the culture of Airbnb?

Ans.

• Late to realizing this, but are gradually re-inforcing this in every step of the way.
• Bad hosts were seriously affecting the business.
• Hosts are partners. Had to get hosts that believed in this same values.
• The super-host program gives them extra support and stuff.

Q. Airbnb has made contributions to the open source community. Thoughts on how that contributes to the thoughts around the development team?

Ans.

• We try to be a generally open culture.
• Strong identification of the team.
  • Every company needed a mote that protects from your competition.
  • Wanted to be better technology. Changed this to be giving the best experience in the world instead.
• The engineers (with those same strong culture values) independently decided this was a thing they should do.

Q. There weren’t that many visitors to the site when trying to get off the ground. How did you get users to the site?

Ans.

• (Not about culture)
• “It’s better to have 100 people who love you, than to have a million people that just kinda sorta like you.” - PG
• To get 100 people to love you, you need to do things that don’t scale.
• Living with your users and spending time with them.
• Giving them attention to the point that they were really passionate.
• A lot of things were done manually for the users.
• Until they knew exactly what the perfect service was, only then did they create the tools and technology to do it.

Q. A lot of people think Airbnb is more of a marketing company? Thoughts?

Ans.

• Have to work with a lot of things like people’s ACTUAL security since there are people sleeping in their hosts’ sheets.
• Countries that need to be convinced that this is a good thing for them.
• Matching the right people with the right hosts.
• These are just a few of the things that they have to do, so it would be wrong to call them a marketing company.

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I'm a software enginer that's worked on various Android projects for a while now. If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, I don't always post about tech things.