Communicate

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For this to work, you need good communication. If you don’t constantly communicate your vision, mission and culture, it will not flow. It’s the lifeblood of your startup. Culture doesn’t spread by accident; it spreads by defined communication and needs consistent reinforcement, just like anything in life. You can do it informally, around the water cooler, or formally, with monthly company meetings and quarterly town halls. Startups have no excuse for poor communication: if you’re five or six people, you should just be able to talk. But when you grow really fast, it gets hard, and communication has to become something you work on.

Startup Secret: You cannot over-communicate in a startup. There is no such thing as too much communication in the early stages. Over-communicate about what you’re experiencing in the marketplace, what you’re learning from each other about building the product and the value proposition, and how you engage together. And do not assume culture, do not assume your mission and vision, and do not take for granted how things are changing around you.

That’s why we pick “actively evolve” as a value: you’ll constantly have change going on around you, and you’ll need to constantly reinforce and re-communicate how your values, vision and mission still apply. There’s a great example in the workbook: GitLab has a great way of talking about communication. What does it mean? How do you get your message out in the right format through the right medium, and how do you test it?

Here’s my startup secret with a simple example. How do you know absolutely clearly that someone has communicated well? You might judge that they’re clear, precise, articulate. But there’s an acid test, which a student named Dan nailed: you can explain it back to them. Why? Because it means the receiver internalized the information and can now share it with somebody else. The truth is there’s no way to feel you’ve been successful at communication; you have to test it. You want somebody to be able to communicate it back to you with as much fidelity as possible: ideally 100% fidelity, not just the words but the intent and the feeling. So test it every day. We send out surveys all the time to our founders, our entrepreneurs, our investors, everybody we talk to regularly: are we doing what we thought we were doing, is our message getting through? If we hear it back differently (which we often do), we ask what we’re not making clear.

This is also the number one thing you do when you start a business. To figure out what problem you solve uniquely well for whom, you have to listen to your customers, the biggest form of communication, and then test that communication by saying it back to them: “I heard your need is X. Did I hear it right?” If you can’t start there, you’re going nowhere. Listening is, in my opinion, the most powerful form of communication.

Salsify (Rob especially) said communication is hugely personal and one of the most difficult things in startups, particularly on the tech side where people can be more introverted. Rob was candid: honest and open communication didn’t come naturally to him; his first marriage failed partly because of it, and now, remarried to a psychiatrist whose parents are both psychiatrists, he’d have been the ugly duckling if he hadn’t spent a lot of time self-reflecting on what open, constant communication really means. Even at ten people all moving hard and fast, they don’t always know what the other nine are up to. He contrasted a previous employer, Cambridge Semantics, which grew out of a research organization: each individual was empowered to run their own plan, project and timeline, so marketing was off on one side doing its own go-to-market, sales was telling each customer different things, and engineering was broken into almost one organization per engineer working in silos. They could do an enormous number of things at once, but there was little cohesion. To win on this you have to take a step back and ask: what’s working and what’s not, how often do we really need to sync up, and what are we not saying to each other that needs to be said? And with customers, are you listening more than talking, asking more questions than you’re giving answers to, really trying to understand how the person across from you understands you? There’s no one answer; it’s something you always have to revisit and question.

Jason added that even at ten people it does not happen naturally: they have to force themselves, explicitly adding things to the calendar, or best intentions won’t survive. He can’t imagine how hard it is at a hundred people when it’s already this hard at ten. I’ve been lucky enough to witness the ten-to-a-hundred-to-a-thousand-to-ten-thousand growth, and I’ve observed a rule of six on communication: the first six people just need a water cooler; the next multiple of six (thirty to forty) really need monthly town halls or all-hands; and when you grow geographically you have to figure out how to replicate that. Daily stand-ups, weekly planning, monthly all-hands: whatever your culture is, you can never make it successful without communication as a fundamental backbone. And I’m a big Dilbert fan for a reason: it’s not far from the truth, people getting stuck in their cubes, digging in on their own thing, losing the ability to relate to everyone else. So establish the rhythm of communication you want, from “no meetings, just the water cooler” to Monday management meetings, Friday sales meetings, monthly staff meetings, quarterly town halls, and an annual offsite.

Aquia showed how this works at scale. Tom described monthly all-company meetings, in person early on and now online across the world, where they deliberately change the theme: sometimes what’s going wrong, sometimes what it’s like to be a public company, sometimes new customers (they had the CIO of Stanford Business School, a customer, address the entire company so everyone understood what it means to be a customer of theirs). They celebrate: after a great 2010 they sent the whole company (120 people) to Puerto Rico for a long weekend. And as you grow you make trade-offs: they turned off the ability for everyone to email everyone once they got big enough that too much “laundry” was being aired. Growing geographically, Tom (who took Web Methods’ international business from 4% to 60% of revenues across thirteen countries) said it starts with communication and setting examples: an all-company meeting every month online; incubating (or “burning”) people in the aquiaculture at headquarters and then shipping them to overseas posts to carry it with them; and complementing that with a lot of executive visits (this week the head of engineering is in Europe, the head of customer solutions is in DC). When he started in international in 1981 moving to Australia, you almost had to create your own culture in each geography; today the internet lets you unify.

And unify without normalizing. As John Bruce, a multi-time successful CEO who ran marketing across Symantec, observed: great cultures don’t normalize to a set of common themes. Going office to office (France, Germany, Italy), the most fun was how different each culture was, and the opportunity is to blend all that disparity into a corporate culture that leverages it. That was a great observation: great cultures empower and bring out the best of what individuals in different circumstances bring, while providing a common framework to channel that energy toward the vision and mission.

Which leads to a practical secret: create a common language. One of the biggest problems in startups is that people all think they’re communicating when they’re really not, each speaking in their own language without agreeing what the words mean. As a Brit, “quite” means a completely different thing than it does to an American; in England “quite” can be grudging acceptance (“quite nice” means not really nice at all), while in America it’s a positive intensifier. In a startup it’s multiple people divided by multiple backgrounds and multiple languages, so defining a common language matters. John made the practical point: talk to your engineers and your sales department about “what we’re building” and they’ll each describe a totally different product unless you help them, which is exactly why you have product marketing and product management: to bring that language together and get people on the same page. Even the constructs and features of the product need to be normalized somewhat, or sales talks about one function and engineering has no clue what it’s about.

Aquia operationalizes this with what they call their GDP, the Goal Deployment Plan. It’s how they get from vision to execution: an annual strategic planning process with monthly follow-ups that produces a series of strategic agenda items (this year, seven), which they communicate and print on the walls for the entire company. It’s a common term everybody knows; “that’s part of GDP” means it’s important and has to get done. When you’re hiring constantly (they hired around 160 people in the last nine months), that consistency is huge, because people coming in halfway through the year can see everyone’s on the same page and quickly get in sync. There’s also a great example on my site: a company called SolidWorks became a multi-hundred-million, then multi-billion-dollar company with a simple execution statement they called “1-1-3.” If you’re intrigued by reducing your execution down to a few numbers, look it up.