Zumper recently won an award from the San Francisco Business Times as one of the Best Small Places To Work in the Bay Area. It made me pause to reflect.
Over the past four years, Zumper went from a couple people working out of free office space and making a fraction of the salaries they could have earned elsewhere to a 75 person company fueled by an unhealthy La Croix addiction that is trying to build something really big.
I used to worry about this transition a lot: How do you grow from 7 to 75 without losing your team culture, that unique DNA that got you your first big wins?
Here are the three lessons I learned:
1. First, this was a stupid way to frame it.
Your early-stage culture is always going to be the foundation, but you have to allow it to evolve. Change is not bad. However much you loved the early days of the hustle and grind, you have to see evolution as a good thing. What makes a Series B company successful is very different from what makes a Seed company successful.
Here’s an example.
Back in the early days we’d make large strategic decisions by shooting from the hip. We had to. We were starving for oxygen and we needed our company culture to reflect that. We used to make fast calls and unpick them even faster if we were wrong, and we did this on repeat. I don’t regret it. It was the right decision at the time, and it wasn’t so much even a decision as it was a cultural norm we adopted from day one without ever talking about it explicitly.
That culture no longer works at our current stage, and we found that out the hard way. A year ago we made a large technical decision in the “quick, let’s go and build” manner. We made the wrong decision. It was a decision that took us more than six months to unpick.
When we recently revisited this decision and came up with a second strategy, we adopted a new cultural norm of doing things that we again never explicitly discussed, but which had evolved sub-consciously in all of us. We spent a month researching the decision. We read extensively. We talked to CTOs and Heads of Engineering at larger companies in parallel industries, and put our cards down on the table: we were not by any means experts in this technical decision and we wanted their advice.
This time around the solution will work.
None of this is to say you should lose the scrappy, hard-working ethic upon which you founded the company. That must remain in your DNA. But the 2am nights at Seed stage that were only about execution must now be replaced by thoughtful research and collaboration to get to the right decision. Same work ethic, but with an evolved culture and higher quality output. And hopefully fewer 2am nights.
Quick team break to celebrate #NationalSelfieDay at HQ ✔️ pic.twitter.com/ah23HfNaQd
— Zumper (@Zumper) June 21, 2017
2. Second, the most immediate lever at your disposal is your hiring and retention strategy.
As I’ve written about before, with each new hire, you aren’t just adding one to your headcount, you’re adding dozens of new relationships to your organization. Your culture is the aggregation of those relationships and how things gets done. And so hiring is the single biggest lever you have to shape your culture.
How do you hire for culture? Now that’s hard. Interview questions alone aren’t going to reveal if someone will be a fit. No one thinks they’re a slacker. No one thinks they’re not a team player or intellectually curious. Look for candidates who embody the culture you’re building. In many cases this could be someone whose resume may not immediately stand out, but whose past experiences of working at, for example, a company that didn’t work out but who fought until the last day makes them a perfect hire for a fast growing company that has its own ups and downs.
Once on board, you have a responsibility to nourish the best additions to your culture and remove the influences that dilute it. Letting people go is the hardest thing you will ever do as CEO, but sometimes you will have to let someone go not because they aren’t clever, but because they don’t fit the way you do things. As long as they’ve been given a fair shot at this, that’s ok because your culture will benefit from it.
3. Third, the role of a CEO in driving the culture has to change too.
Back in the early days, as a founder you have a critical influence on every interaction, every decision, every cultural signal. You want to be in every meeting, at every team dinner, making sure everyone is getting on well and that everyone feels heard.
At 75 people, your personal role in culture is still critical, but it also needs to evolve. It’s now about fostering what the team brings, rather than trying to impose a cultural ideal on them.
The dozens of people we’ve added in the past four years have brought a wonderful blend of brainpower, experience and humor with them. Your job cannot be to tell these people how to live up to those halcyon Seed days. If we’d done that at Zumper, we would have continued to make decisions without the proper diligence. Your role as the CEO of a larger organization is to channel everything your new hires bring into a culture that remains authentic and consistent with the early DNA, but which grows and matures with the company.
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