Vision, Mission & Values: Create an Authentic Culture

▶ Watch the original lecture

We’re going to have a lot of fun this evening, and I hope you leave with one word: inspiration. What we’re trying to do is make sure you get a chance to engage on what you actually want. A lot of you filled in the survey and told me why you came. Many of you came right to the point and said things like, “How do we define our culture?” Well, that’s the core of this workshop, and it’s really important to me that you get somewhere with it today.

How I approach this is not with answers at all. It’s with questions, because there is no such thing as an answer to “how do you define a culture.” It’s going to be unique to you. It’s going to be specific to your venture, and it’s going to be defined very much in concert with who you are as a person.

We tend to think of culture as a very soft thing, something you can’t feel or touch. So what is it we’re trying to define if it’s something you can’t touch and feel? By the end of this evening, I want you to have some elements of culture that feel very real to you.

There are no answers, but there is an important outcome: it matters that you have a culture. And I’ll tell you why right up front. If it doesn’t get defined by you, it will get defined on its own. And you might not like that. It could turn out to be a bacteria: the kind of culture you wouldn’t want, that would infect your company in the wrong way, that would not attract people but on the contrary would make you unproductive. So my answer up front is simple: define it as early as you possibly can. The rest is up to you.

Startup Secret: Culture will define you even if you don’t define it. Very quickly a startup gets a reputation, which is just how you’re behaving. Just like your brand, your messaging and your positioning, if you don’t take control of it, it gets defined by other people. So if you want a culture that stands for something, declare it early.

Why are vision, mission and culture important? There are some elements of culture that are actually very tangible. One of the most important is having a vision and mission that is clear about what you’re trying to do. Any stakeholder who wants to engage with you needs to know what you’re trying to do, otherwise why would they get involved? Take it to the extreme: this is a customer. Why would a customer engage with you if you’re not clear about what problem you’re solving for whom, uniquely well? They’ll be all over the map.

It’s just as important for hiring. If people don’t know what your purpose is and can’t relate to it, how are they going to get excited about it, and then contribute to it? If you don’t put any vision or mission out there, it’s the classic story: any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going. Likewise, if you don’t have a culture defined and you start hiring, what criteria are you going to use? Sure, you can use experience, knowledge and skills. But if you find out people are fundamentally different in their values about things like honesty or trust, that’s a real problem. You could end up with a very disparate set of energies in your company before you even get going.

Get it right and it helps you execute. It brings focus, because everybody’s clear about what they’re doing. It brings alignment. One team here, Connected, put it perfectly. Gulnaz said that after two years, building their 2.0 version, they still every six months have the question of where they are going, and every team needs to understand again what they’re doing, to stay on track and to speak the same language internally and externally. That’s exactly why this is so important. If everybody is not on the same page and doesn’t even share the same language about how they talk about what you do, your energies get literally wasted in all the different directions people go off in.

Another team, Agora, an after-school marketplace giving kids in Latin America access to courses in Spanish for their passions, raised the flip side. They need to empower their teachers to deliver what they want to deliver, but keep alignment so it doesn’t become a mess of different cultures across different classes. Imagine if instead of a rulebook of things you must not do, or a set of instructions to follow (which is the opposite of empowering), you could give people a culture that made them feel, “I’m incredibly clear that I’m empowered,” plus alignment around a very clear vision, mission and purpose they could all get behind. That’s attractive, and it’s empowering. That’s what we’re talking about tonight.

This is not a soft thing. It’s a hard fact that the greatest and most successful companies, and you can go look at this on Fortune 500 analyses, are usually those with the best cultures. They’re the best places to work, the places where everybody wants to go and work.

Let me put it all together, because people lose track of where it all fits. You start with some kind of value prop addressing a problem you want to solve or an opportunity you want to exploit (there’s a whole Startup Secrets workshop on that, so you don’t have to worry about it tonight). Imagine you had a really clear problem to solve, but you couldn’t all agree what that problem was. That’s what vision and mission are for. You all need to know where you’re headed. People make decisions all day long; you can’t keep coming back to the well to check every one. You want a culture that empowers people and aligns them. And between those two things, at the bottom, I’ve written one keyword, and it’s not “culture.” It’s consistency. You want a platform people can rely on. When they go back to touch that touchstone of what they’re doing, why, how they’re empowered, and what your cultural values are, they can rely on it. If that keeps changing, you’re in a lot of trouble.

Now, businesses get into trouble. I’ve never once backed a startup that went from zero to a billion dollars in a straight line. It just doesn’t happen. It’s the exact opposite: a wonderful journey I call the startup squiggle. If you’re lucky it ends somewhere with great value created, but in the troughs of disillusionment, in the pivots, in the moments where you’re trying to raise money or you suddenly discover you’re in the wrong marketplace, you have big challenges to overcome. The one thing that can help you get through is culture.

Let me tell you a story. I was lucky enough to back some great founders who were one of the very first companies in the SaaS business (SaaS wasn’t even a word then). We went through so much pain that at one point my entire partnership declared the company bankrupt, because they couldn’t understand SaaS economics; those hadn’t been invented, we were busy writing that book. That was problem one. Problem two: the founder had taken IP out of a prior company and got sued, and we had to move him out of the CEO position and hire a new CEO. Any one of these things could have taken the company down. In the middle of that, the market decided the business needed a different business model than the one we had. We didn’t accept that. We stuck with our business model, and that company became a very successful IPO and was ultimately acquired for 2.8 billion dollars. What was consistent through all of it? Culture. I could repeat that story for almost every company I’ve ever backed.

So, one word for the end of the night: this stuff really does translate to the top line, the bottom line, and the fundamental worth of your business. It’s a soft subject and a hard one, because you can’t just go down a checklist and say “I’ve got a culture.” But once you put the roots down and build consistently, it becomes a platform for your success.