Evolve

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Culture stays consistent, but it does evolve, and that’s not a contradiction. You should not be pivoting your culture the way you pivot a product or a market, but you are winging it and learning constantly, and things change. The culture of a company today is different from when I started my career thirty years ago; new hires don’t want the same things, and if you’re building a great company you’ll change some of those elements over time. Maybe not the core values, but, for example, that alcohol is tolerated and available (a Kegerator in the office) is not something people twenty years ago would have thought okay. So don’t get the impression you have to nail all of this up front.

One value I always espoused is that it’s okay to be wrong, because it’s too much of a constraint to always expect people to be right. Great startups make breakthroughs, and the word “breakthrough” has “break” in it: you’re going to break stuff and end up in places with unknowns. So do your best to get a culture that’s consistent, but be okay with the fact that it might not work perfectly if, say, you hired a bunch of people with a different approach to alcohol, partying, or what office hours should be. Cultures evolve as generations and expectations evolve, and it’s good to be open that you’re evolving them.

Here’s a concrete example of how my own companies’ cultures evolved. My first company I started at eighteen, with no idea what I was doing (which is partly why I give these workshops, to share the scar tissue). Back then, everything was about being accountable in very defined ways to the bottom line; that’s all anyone thought about. What I notice in my great companies now is that they have social giving programs: they’ve found ways to engage employees in giving back to their communities. That has nothing to do with the bottom line; it’s totally outside the company, but it helps teams form around causes they really believe in. So after about 1990, in every one of my companies I created a matching donor program: if any team member said, “I believe in this charity, would you match it?”, I would automatically match it. (Tom supports Movember every year, so I know he’ll ask me to write a check, and I’ll match his donation again this year, because it matters.) That’s not something I knew to do twenty or thirty years ago. It’s okay, and actually good, to be evolving these things.

The reason “actively evolve” is one of our four core values is exactly this. Every day we get up and actively evolve to listen to what our founders and entrepreneurs need, because their world is constantly evolving: their stage, their market, how that market has shifted. If we can actively evolve with them to understand how to help them, we might change venture for good. So evolution is not a threat to consistency; it’s how a consistent culture stays authentic and alive as the world around it changes. Aquia even revisits and articulates its vision every year in strategic planning to keep everyone aligned, without transforming the original vision; they just articulate it in a way that lets them execute better. Evolve the expression and the practices; keep the bedrock.

To bring it home: this is really about finding a platform of cultural consistency which, along with your vision and mission, can lead you where you want to get. Bring it in a form people can relate to, that empowers them, that feels motivational and memorable, that you communicate and reinforce consistently, and that you live, and you’re going to build a great, enduring, valuable company.