Best of Build Mode: Scaling Company Culture

Speaker A: Hello. Hello.

Speaker B: Welcome back to Build Mode. I'm your host, Isabelle Johannesson, and today I'm here with our producer, Maggie Nye. And Maggie, I have a question for you. After digging through all of the footage of Build Mode over the seasons, what do you think is something that almost every guest has mentioned that is going

Speaker C: to have to be company culture? Uh, it's something that I've really learned going through all of these episodes. Founders really need to think about early. It is something that sets the tone, sets the vibe as you grow your team. And it's something that can't really be taken back once you have a culture set in place that tends to only grow. So, yeah, today we're going to be sharing some clips from episodes all about how different leaders have thought about setting the tone of their team, intentionally building their culture. Maybe a couple things they wish they had done differently. To help us settle into this topic of company culture, we're going to hear a clip from Ian Schmidt, a consultant at trimergence, which is an agency that helps founders and leaders and teams develop frameworks to work most effectively together. Here, Ian is discussing why founders should invest in a leadership coach early on. Because when it comes to culture and setting the vibes of a workplace, you really can't ever hit the reset button.

Speaker D: I always say scale yourself so you can scale the company. Right. You need to be on your own exponential growth curve. And we hear this all the time, oh, I don't have time right now. I'm going to kick the can down the road or there's nothing's broken. Right. And what I would say is the more you invest now with the power of compounding, you're going to save an enormous amount of time. I've seen it happen time and time again and if you wait, it's actually going to end up messier and taking more time to clean up and, um, reduce the noise. So that's one piece. The other piece is what we found is super powerful, is if you have a set of tools that are very simple, that are potent both for that self awareness journey, for navigating the relational dynamic and to sort of map and manage your internal state, that state of being when we get triggered, if you have that integrated and then you, you deploy it for yourselves and in the company as a, uh, as a platform, if you will, with kind of a standard methodology, that relationship and OS upgrade process can be super efficient and really effective. And what's great is what works at with two founders, then that platform scales to 20 to 200 headcount to 2000 and we've seen it beyond, you know, we've had clients for 20 years with the same platform to make it super, super efficient and effective. And, and I guarantee you it's going to save time, it's going to help you get better results faster, it's going to unlock all kinds of energy and it's going to be a lot more fun and fulfilling.

Speaker B: I love this idea of, you know, when, when you do the work on yourself, it spreads to the next person, to the next person, to the next person. I think that's important in just non business context as well. But especially when you're the founder of this company, the leader, the face, the figurehead of this company. The work you do on yourself will then spread to your, your co founders, to your teammates, to your customers. Um, and really to sort of take that seriously.

Speaker D: Well, and, and at the end of the day your culture is how, how you interact and how your feet move. It's not the um, values that you put on the wall or what have you. Everybody's watching the founder and the core team, like that's the culture, right? And so yeah, you want it to be as clean and that noise reduction algorithm and you're, you're really juicing up what you're all here to do.

Speaker C: Scaling startups and growth stage companies can find themselves in a precarious position. Uh, a culture is easy to establish and maintain when you have a team of five, but when that team grows to 10, 20, 100 people, a founder can't be everywhere. So having trusted people in leadership positions is crucial. Next you're going to hear from Hala Jalwani, the co founder and CEO of Rivio, an enterprise AI service that automates corporate purchasing and contract management. And she gets into how they think about leadership hires when it comes to maintaining their company culture.

Speaker A: Because I also think that the future of teams are small and more generalist in term of at the end of the day right now, each person for us in a non AI world would have been the equivalent of three hires. And I see this number not exponentially growing, but every year we're seeing the capacity of each person growing. So it really matter who are you bringing in? Are they adding to the culture? Are they able to grow later on into their own um, leader in that

Speaker C: space, hiring is hard, but firing is much harder. In the next clip you'll hear from Eyal Yogev, the CEO of Anjuna, which is a data security company for agentic AI. And he gets into the One word he believes actually matters when it comes to company culture and how he's managed to maintain relatively high morale at his company even after conducting multiple layoffs.

Speaker E: When everything is kind of up into the right and everybody's happy, you can get away with culture. That's not great, maybe. But when things are bad, you know, if you have a good culture, that's what keeps people around, what keeps you together as a team.

Speaker B: Well, so, uh, what. How did you sort of build that culture? Because you also mentioned that, you know, the second sort of round of layoffs was more difficult. Right. And to kind of keep morale up during these difficult times. What was. What was your train of thought?

Speaker E: Yeah, I can talk about just sort of culture in general and kind of how I think about culture. And I think one of the kind of, kind of benefits. One of the things that I kind of had was that I, uh. I've seen a bunch of people kind of coming right out of college and, you know, starting companies, and it's great, right? And some of them are the most successful, you know, entrepreneurs on the planet. Some of them, yeah, some of them, yeah, those. Survival bias, right? You know, the ones that are. And you never hear the ones that are not. But the. The kind of. The downside of that is if you'd never worked at a company and you never kind of experience different company cultures and what you like, what you don't like, what, you know, works better with. So I think kind of one of the benefits that I had was that I worked at a bunch of companies before starting this company. So I kind of saw. I saw a bunch of company cultures for each one, I kind of took. This is things that I like. These are things that I don't like. This is something I'll never want to do of, you know, of a company, you know, and to me, and it's funny, one of the things that I've kind of saw very early on is people kind of have these kind of 10, you know, these are, uh, culture, 10 things on the wall. And it's. None of it matter. It's not about what you write in the wall. It's not about you say, it's what you do, right? And basically a culture is. Basically, there's a thousand little decisions that you. You make every day, and those are the ones that actually define the culture. It doesn't matter what you have on the wall. Like, no, nobody cares about it. Nobody listens to it. It's. And it almost becomes like a. Almost like, uh, a if what you do is different than what you say. It almost becomes like an internal joke within the company, though. They say, like, it's. It's very hard to get away from that. And what I like. And it's funny. I. I kind of. I heard, um, Jason Wang, the founder of Zoom, talk about this, and he kind of talked about it the exact same way that I would think about this, which I loved, and actually took it to my company. And he said he has only one word when it comes to culture, and that's care. That, you know, I care about my employees. I care, you know, we care about our customers. We care about, you know, every. Our vendors. We. And I love that. And that's kind of what I took for our company culture. And we kind of use care as the kind of the word for the company culture. And to me, it's just a thousand little things. I could give some examples. But, like, every decision that you make, right, it's from even people that you. Not necessarily that, you know, you're going to hire, right?

Speaker F: You're.

Speaker E: You're interviewing somebody. If you decide not to move forward, is letting them know that. And I'll just sort of, you know, ghosting them and disappearing, right? That's. That's part of it. How you, you know, part ways with somebody. You know, how do you talk about people? Like, I've been in companies, or once somebody leaves or they're like, go. People start kind of talking, you know, you know, saying bad things about them. And I didn't like that. Right. You know, it's. Even if they weren't great, there's really no point bringing that. But especially people that were great. I knew they were great and they decided to leave. But then, you know, within these companies, they started, you know, kind of, you know, badmouthing them because they've left, and I hated that. Uh, so it's that. And obviously, everybody in the company, obviously everybody. You know, as you part ways as part of Riff, how do you kind of make sure that you give people the. As much support as you can as you do that? How do you communicate this? How do you make sure it's communicated? It's not because, you know, maybe some roles are not needed anymore, but it's not because these people haven't done their job right. There's a bunch of things that you can do to. To kind of make the transition easier.

Speaker C: Eyal is clearly a very compassionate leader. So we're going to continue on with another deeply caring founder, Leah Sullivan, formerly of TaskRabbit and who more recently started her own fund, Precedent VC. So in this next clip, she lays out when, how, and most importantly, why building a diverse team, uh, should be something that is top of mind for every founder.

Speaker B: I do want to talk a little bit about just generally, like, your advice for early stage founders. Building diverse teams. Right. How much of a priority should it be and how should they go about doing it? From day one, I feel like oftentimes it's sort of like the company has scaled and it's an afterthought now. We should be diverse, but really from day one.

Speaker G: Yeah. You can't save it till later because it'll never happen. You can't. And why is that? Well, because it's. It's easier to swim in the flow of the river. Right? It's like, it's easier just to take. You say you're hiring, you know, scaling up your engineering team. You have 20 resumes that come in. You're like, oh, this person looks good, this guy looks good, this guy looks good, this guy looks good. Like, boom, your team is filled. That's the easy path. Okay. The hard path is saying, I've got to fill 10 positions on my team, and for every position, I want to see two female candidates. For every position, for every one position that I'm seeing a male, ah, resume, I want to see two females. That takes longer. But if you do that from the beginning, and we did that at TaskRabbit from the beginning, and our networks were different too. Right. We knew people that, you know, looked different and thought, uh, differently. And so that helps too. If your founding team is diverse, that already gives you an edge. And so, but if you do that from the beginning, then it becomes easier because the culture that's built, the team that's built, the network that you've built as a company is more diverse and it feeds itself. It becomes an ecosystem. It's. It's too late if you wait until you've scaled and it's at the end.

Speaker B: No, I, I agree. And I'm, you know, I'm, I'm curious if women founders take more or put more attention on building diverse teams just off, you, uh, know, almost instinctively. Right. Like, I see the value clearly in having a diverse team totally. Rather than it being a box. I need to check.

Speaker G: Yes.

Speaker B: But in turn, you know, women founded companies are often more successful in many ways. Right. And I, I can't help but thinking those two go hand in hand. But I'm curious, on, on your take, why do we think that, you know, you know, women founded Companies are, are so successful.

Speaker G: Yeah, I mean, it's true. And the numbers back it up, too. There's data that shows that, you know, more diverse teams, founding teams, are more profitable. They build more profitable businesses. And so, you know, if as an investor, you want to invest in a higher return, more profitable business, you should be investing in more diverse founding teams as well. And then if you're an LP that wants to invest in a fund that wants to see a high ROI on your fund returns, you should be asking your general partner, fund managers, how they think about diversity and investing. Like, uh, it. It flows all the way up and down the chain. Right. I think the other component is that, you know, we as women and I think underrepresented groups as well. We're so used to kind of like, fighting our way through life and fighting our way through things. And, you know, you get to a point, at least I feel this way, where you've had success, you've, you know, completed the marathon, you've, like, reached that goal, and then what do you do? Well, you, you, you want to bring others along. You know, I mean, I, I almost feel this, like, it's not almost. I feel this obligation to bring others along. Right. And so for me, it's not just about investing out of a fund and, and great. It's like, if I'm looking at it through my lens, then I'll probably invest. You know, I'm, um, twice as likely to invest in a female founder than, you know, my partner might be great. But it's like, on top of that, there is an obligation to change the system, because I've lived through the system. Right. And I think, you know, anytime a female founder has had success, has lived through the system, um, there is that drive to you to be like, wow, that really needs to change. We should change that.

Speaker C: We've talked a lot about what founders can do early on to establish the company culture they want. But what about the future? We had Jasper Carmichael, Jack from Artisan on to discuss how AI can impact the way teams work.

Speaker F: Yeah, I think culture is one of the most difficult things in the company because it defines whether people enjoy work, whether people want to work, how they work, the style of working. Uh, it really defines the success of a company. Do you have a culture that people are happy in, that people want to work a lot in, and that people are being productive in and not doing fake, unnecessary work? Um, and it's something that we've learned a lot about over the past couple years. I don't think there's Any good answer? It's just like a constant iteration process. One thing is that your company will always have your worst traits. So you need to try and minimize your worst traits. If you are late to meetings, everyone else is going to be late to meetings because you are. Um, so that's one thing you need to be really careful with. And they won't have your best traits.

Speaker D: Your best traits.

Speaker F: You still need to. You can't tell people what to do. You need to tell people why they need to do it. So, like, you can't say this needs to be done immediately. Be like, we need to do this because we have this outcome that we're trying to achieve and guide people rather than push people.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, it sounds like parenting almost as they say. Not as I do.

Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker B: Well, speaking of company culture, so I'm curious, when you are working with your customers, how does having an AI agent on a team impact company culture?

Speaker F: I think it's interesting. I think we're in such early, uh, stages of AI employees and of AI agents that it's on the spectrum of having a software product and an AI employee. We're here right now. We're not here yet. It doesn't actually feel like having a full colleague yet. I think we're going to get here in the next year or so and then maybe here in next three or four years. But right now, it's not at a point where it feels like you're actually interacting with another human on a team. Some people can feel threatened because they're like, oh, what is this AI that's coming and doing my things? But most people feel empowered and they're excited to have this tool that can do all this work that they hated doing before. Um, but I think as we move further down the spectrum, further down the scale, and we get closer and closer to having a true human like AI employee, it will be a completely different interaction because you'll be messaging them on Slack, you'll be speaking to them on video calls. They'll be talking in the all hands. They'll be asking you questions and seeking information from you. And that's what we're getting closer to, which I think is exciting and scary.

Speaker C: All right, well, on, um, that exciting and scary note, we're going to wrap up this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Build Mode. Wherever you listen, write us a review, catch us on YouTube, leave us a comment, share us with your friends, your family, your followers even. And of course. Take it easy until we see you right back here next time.

Speaker B: Build Mode is a TechCrunch podcast. Each episode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye and hosted by me, Isabel Johanneson. Our art and design is also by Maggie Nye. A, uh, big thanks to Morgan Little, who leads our audience development, the Foundry and Cheddar video teams, and most of all to you, the builders, and everyone else in the wider startup community. We'll see you back here next time.