John Collison, Patrick Collison, and Ben Silberman - Hiring and CultureLecture Transcript: http://tech.genius.com/Patrick-collison-lecture-11-company-culture-and-building-a-team-part-ii-annotated
Stripe and Pinterest - two companies well known for their strong cultures. The founders - John Collison, Patrick Collison, and Ben Silberman - take Q&A from Sam in part 2 of Hiring and Culture.
See the readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec11/
Discuss this lecture: https://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64040
Brian Chesky & Alfred Lin - CultureLecture Transcript: http://tech.genius.com/Alfred-lin-lecture-10-company-culture-and-building-a-team-part-i-annotated
Brian Chesky, Founder of Airbnb, and Alfred Lin, Former COO of Zappos and Partner at Sequoia Capital discuss how to build a great company culture.
See the slides and readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec10/
Discuss this lecture: https://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64039
Kathryn Minshew - Creating Good Company CultureKathryn Minshew, the cofounder and CEO of career development platform The Muse, speaks at Y Combinator's 2016 Female Founders Conference in San Francisco, CA
Claire McDonnell & Jennifer Kim - Building An Inclusive Company CultureClaire McDonnell - https://twitter.com/clairethere - is cofounder and COO of True Link Financial (YC S13) - https://www.truelinkfinancial.com/. True Link is a financial services firm that offers money management, investment, and insurance products, primarily for retirees.
Jennifer Kim - https://twitter.com/jenistyping - is currently advising startups. Prior to that she was the Head of Employee Experience and Development at Lever - https://www.lever.co. Lever makes recruiting software and they were part of the Summer 2012 batch.
Kat Manalac - https://twitter.com/KatManalac - is a partner here at YC.
Kat Manalac - Diversity + Inclusion at Early Stage StartupsKat Manalac, Partner and Director of Outreach at YC, hosts a panel with Makinde Adeagbo (dev/color), Cat Perez (HealthSherpa), Jennifer Kim (Lever), Ashu Desai (Make School), Mitchell Lee (Penny) and Cristina Cordova (Stripe) to discuss the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workforce for early stage companies.
Jason Kilar - Scaling CultureJason Kilar is the former CEO of Hulu and Vessel, and an early executive at Amazon. He joined us at The Scaleup Offsite to talk about establishing and scaling a company’s culture.
Key takeaways:
Culture starts with what you do when nobody is looking.
How a trip Disney World as a kid made Jason obsessed with companies and cultures that, at scale, stand above others. After he landed his first job at Disney, he came to observe the following cultural best practices:
- Be explicit about what you want the culture of your company to be.
- Walk the talk. Walt Disney would stop to pick up the smallest piece of litter at the theme park, which reinforced the message that attention to detail was super important.
- Embrace mechanisms Invent or use good processes that can be repeated and delivered at scale.
In Jason’s time at Amazon, the company had a “just do it” award, which served as mechanism for reinforcing great behaviors from employees. Everything from saving on electrical bills to pushing back on bureaucracy.
When you think about your culture, think of it as a repellent as much as a magnet. You want some people to feel like it’s not for you.
A challenge with great cultures is that you have to live up to them every day. You will be tested often, and you need to fight for things that are important to your value and principles.
