Culture is Critical
I often like to joke that the dozen or so years I’ve spent working in and helping to build startups is the longest case study in how not to run a startup. Since starting SimpleGeo Matt and I have obsessed about culture. We spend a lot of time attempting to make SimpleGeo a great company to work for filled with wonderfully talented people working on difficult problems.
Recently, while working on our mission statement, Jeffrey, Rob, and I were brainstorming words we felt represented SimpleGeo’s products, goals, and mission. Two things ended up happening:
- We kept interrupting each other. Finally, Jeffrey had had enough and we decided that we’d allow each other to fully express their opinions before retorting.
- I shared some random link from the internet and started a completely unrelated discussion. All of the sudden Rob starts making a rowing motion with his arms. I asked, “What the hell does that mean?” Rob said it was an old joke from another company he worked at where they referred to people getting off-track in meetings as “kayaking.” From that point on all three of us were making rowing motions whenever one of us got off-track.
These two simple rules got me thinking. What if we codified a set of principles for SimpleGeo? What if our employees had guiding principles that they could point at during the hiring process, while building products, while arguing, etc.? After further thought, I sent off a Basecamp message with my initial thoughts on what would eventually become SimpleGeo’s “Cultural Creed.”
Being an agile shop, we iterated from my initial ideas into a set of 10, well 9, principles that we believe embodied SimpleGeo. Here they are:
- Approach people and ideas with courage and respect.
- Be attentive to customers and their needs.
- Embrace and learn from failure.
- Be curious.
- Celebrate the bizarre.
- Codify best practices.
- Be adaptable; things change.
- Repay technical debt.
- Embrace and drive change.
GOTO 1
There you have it. The SimpleGeo Cultural Creed. I think too often in the race to raise money, hire more engineers, and build products that startups forget that their companies are an organism that’s growing and changing over time. As such, it’s important to remember your DNA.
Cheers,
Joe Stump
CTO & Co-founder
