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Guest post by Kevin Simler, who works at Palantir, observes the startup scene, and writes
at Melting Asphalt, about… well, go see for yourself.
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In their natural habitats, social species organize into characteristic groups. Gazelles
form herds, wolves form packs, and ants form colonies. Humans, in the same way,
form tribes.
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Of course, we’re pre y far removed from our natural habitat these days. But tribes
are a large and fundamental part of our evolutionary heritage, and they have a
corresponding influence on our mental and social lives. Organizing ourselves into Crash Early, Crash Often
tribes is one of the ways we manufacture normalcy. It helps our paleolithic minds
perceive and act, more or less sensibly, in an increasingly complex modern world.
Be Slightly Evil
Humans also form kingdoms, nations, states, and civilizations, but those units of
organizations aren’t as fundamental to our psychology. Statecraft is an esoteric
enterprise; we spend most of our cycles processing social data at the tribal scale.
Even Kissinger, for all his mastery of foreign relations, had to play tribe-level
politics in the White House and State Department.
Below 10 employees, all you have is a simple working group. Above 1000 you’ll
start to need “more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable,
cohesive group.” Between those two is where the tribe lies.
To do that, we’ll need to use the methods of anthropology rather than business
analysis. I hope to show that this is a productive lens for understanding
startups.[1] It’s not the only lens, of course. It can’t tell us much about the very
early days of a company, or about its strategy for going to market. But it can tell us
a lot about internal dynamics during the middle stages of growth — after a startup Tempo
has its foot in the market but before an IPO or acquisition.
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I’m writing about the world of startups because that’s where I’ve been doing
amateur ethnography for the past 7 years. But these concepts should apply just as
Every Cradle is a Grave
well to any mid-sized organization or workplace.
Most mid-sized startups talk about culture, have a culture page on their websites,
and screen for cultural fit. Some have comprehensive “bootcamps” where new
employees learn about the culture. And many of the world’s most successful
institutions are famously obsessive about it: Apple (largest public company),
Bridgewater (largest hedge fund), Netflix, Valve, and Zappos, to name a few. Their
cultural guidebooks (bibles?) make for fascinating literature.[2]
Let’s situate ourselves by asking: what region do startups inhabit in the space of all
actual (or possible) cultures? One of the more useful tools for doing this, I’ve
found, is cultural dimensions theory.[3] This will help locate startups in culture-
space, but it won’t help us understand the culture of any particular startup; we’ll
get to that in a minute.
Cultural dimensions theory was first explored by Geert Hofstede at IBM in the
1960s and 70s and later in his book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the
Mind. Using a survey of IBM’s massive worldwide workforce and some statistics
(factor analysis), Hofstede identified the four (and later, five) most significant
dimensions along which different cultures vary:
Power distance: The extent to which the less powerful members of organizations
and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.
Collectivism (vs. individualism): The degree to which individuals are integrated
into groups.
Uncertainty avoidance: The extent to which the members of a culture feel
threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations.
Masculinity vs. femininity: The distribution of emotional roles between the
genders. Masculine cultures value competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism,
ambition and power, whereas feminine cultures place more value on
relationships and quality of life. (Sometimes this dimension is neutered to
Quantity of life vs. Quality of life.)
Long-term orientation: The degree to which a culture fosters virtues oriented
toward future rewards — especially perseverance and thrift. Fun fact: this
dimension was initially termed Confucian work dynamism.
Let’s look at a few of these dimensions that are especially important for delineating
‘startup culture.’
Startups have a very high tolerance for uncertainty (low uncertainty avoidance). It might
be more accurate to speak of an appetite for uncertainty, since a startup by
definition doesn’t understand its own business model and must explore, both in
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the market and in design space. There’s a frontier spirit to a startup, evidenced by
phrases like pragmatic, risk-taking, pivot, and fail early, fail often. As it grows and
ages, a startup will become more cautious. It will need to protect its (increasingly
valuable) resources, and the spirit of risk-taking that drove the initial growth will
be in danger of fading. The company will also need to become more legible (with
titles, policies, rules, and structure) in order to manage its increasing complexity.
Startups have low power-distances. In Silicon Valley, you’ll hear buzzwords like flat,
transparent, and meritocratic, or “titles don’t ma er here.” But flat refers to more
than just the number of layers in the hierarchy — it also means you can criticize
your boss’s ideas, or hang out with your boss’s boss after work. Having a flat
culture is important, especially in the face of uncertainty, for making sure
information flows ‘uphill’ as freely as possible. As it grows and ages, power
distance will increase. The company will tend to become more status conscious[4]
and less transparent. This doesn’t necessarily spell the demise of meritocracy, but it
will require more special a ention.
Startups are highly collective enterprises, aka tight-knit teams. Solidarity is absolutely
essential to success. If you aren’t all rowing together, your ship is liable to go
nowhere. Luckily, there are a lot of factors keeping the collective spirit high,
including the compensation structure (stock options), external threats, and having
a homogeneous culture. As it grows and ages, a startup tends to become more
individualistic. When everyone’s working as a tight-knit team, it’s easy to spot who
isn’t pulling their weight, or who’s looking to advance their own agenda at the
expense of the company’s. But once the atmosphere begins to rarefy, free-riders
and politicians have room to make a home. Turf wars will become more common.
And the dilution of shared ownership doesn’t help either. As we’ll see later,
solidarity rituals are one of the important ways a startup can maintain a collective
orientation in the face of growth.
If dimensions are useful for comparing cultures, folkways can be used to analyze a
single culture in depth, largely on its own terms.
In Albion’s Seed, he breaks each of his four cultures into a couple dozen
component ‘ways’. Examples of these components include speech ways (how
people use language), dress ways (how they dress), time ways (how they think
about time), and rank ways (how people are assorted into ranks). The idea is that
once you’ve described a society through each of its components, you will have
essentially sequenced its genome.
Here’s a suggestive list of what might constitute a startup folkway, along with a
couple questions to illustrate each item. Keep in mind that what’s important here is
the exercise (of breaking a culture down), not the particular components per se.
Rank ways. How does rank affect the amount of influence a person has? How
are promotion decisions made?
Time ways. How are product cycles broken down? What activities take place on
weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly cadences?
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Office ways. How are desks and offices arranged/assigned? [5] What are the
core working hours, noise levels, interruption norms, etc.?
Meeting ways. How, when, and why are meetings initiated? Who talks, who
takes notes, and who’s distracted by their phone or laptop?
Email ways. What kinds of decisions are made over email vs. in meetings? How
are mailing lists used?
Decision-making ways. How are important decisions made? Democratically?
Autocratically?
Compensation ways. How is compensation divided between bonuses, salary,
and equity? How much does it vary by rank, seniority, and job function, versus
by achievement?
Work/life balance ways. I’ll just point here.
Hiring ways and firing ways. How are hiring decisions made, and by whom?
How are bad hires identified and weeded out?
Project management ways. How are the goals for a project determined? How is
success measured?
Coding ways. How is code quality enforced? How territorial are people about
code ownership?
… and many others (celebration ways, onboarding ways, info dissemination
ways, planning ways, customer-relation ways, media ways, etc.)
Basically, this is the set of questions that new employees should be obsessing over
during their first few weeks/months on the job — or be er yet, while they’re
interviewing and negotiating an offer.
Acquiring this cultural knowledge is hugely important, but also difficult, largely
because of how implicit and undocumented all these ‘ways’ are. Candidates and
new employees need to triangulate, use subtle social cues, and more generally
engage in participant observation in order to become fluent in the culture of a mid-
sized startup.
One thing that’s great about folkways analysis is that, as you’re breaking a culture
into its component parts, you begin to see just how interlocking those parts are.
Deeper pa erns start to emerge, and you pre y quickly converge on values. If a
startup is truly a meritocracy, this will be wri en all over its office ways, meeting
ways, rank ways, compensation ways, and hiring and firing ways. Whether a
startup values work/life balance will show up in its time ways, office ways, and
compensation ways.
Rituals
When thinking about rituals, it’s easy to imagine something like a raindance — a
purely symbolic performance with no causal relationship to its intended effect
(rain). But this is dangerously misleading. Most rituals are effective. They may use
symbols, but only as a way of mediating some real effect, usually in the social
world. For a canonical example, don’t think raindance, think giving a gift.
As in all human cultures, rituals are pervasive in startups, and they serve a number
of purposes. They help reinforce the hierarchy (1:1s, staff meetings), define group
membership (badges, interview gauntlet as initiation ritual), reinforce shared
values and goals (public shaming/celebrations, hackathons), and build trust.
Building trust and enhancing solidarity (i.e. collectivism) is the purpose behind an
especially rich set of rituals. Most companies do the occasional happy hour,
holiday party, or company retreat. Startups go the extra mile. Here are some of the
many rituals I’ve seen startups use to reinforce trust, solidarity, and company (or
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team) pride:
Branded apparel. T-shirts, jackets, or hoodies printed with the company logo or
an inside joke. One company I know sports bright neon v-neck workout shirts.
It functions as a great shibboleth.
Team sports. Most companies play either pick-up games or in intramural
leagues. Spend a couple hours on the court or field (or yoga studio) with your
teammates, and you’ll feel a lot closer back in the office as well.
Themed dress-up days. These are days when employees decide to wear
something out of the ordinary. Suits (worn ironically of course) are especially
popular. I’ve also seen pajamas, wacky-hats, and mismatched clothing.
Wearing something distinctive and synchronizing with your teammates is an
especially powerful way of signalling, “We are all in the same tribe.”
Shared meals. Free food is pre y common among startups, and it goes beyond
just saving employees a trip to a local restaurant. Communal meals — from
Spartan syssitia to potlucks to college dining halls — are a time-honored
bonding ritual.
Wall art. Going ‘tribal’ on the walls — by hanging posters, painting a mural, or
just writing on it — is another classic ritual used to signal a collective spirit in
the office.
Parties and other extracurricular activities. Examples include movie nights,
concerts, sporting events, progressive dinner parties, and book discussion
groups. As one of my teammates put it, “You don’t discuss books with your
coworkers; you discuss them with your friends.”
It’s tempting to trivialize these activities as merely for “morale,” but they
accomplish far more than just keeping people happy. They help people identify
with the team. They create emotional bonds and social relationships. And they can
actually change the communication topology of the company — which, by virtue
of Conway’s law, may also have an effect on the product a startup is building.
Tribal bonding rituals can even help mitigate politics. One of the more pernicious
disease states a growing organization will face is when employees start treating
other teams as a homogeneous out-group they. “IT doesn’t do anything” or
“Engineering doesn’t care about the customer.” But this tendency can be softened
just by knowing the name and face of someone in that ‘outside’ group, which can
happen during dinner, while playing sports, or at a party.
The fact that most rituals have a strong physical component is one of the reasons
remote workers are difficult — even if the physical component is just being in the
same room together and watching each other’s facial expressions, eye contact, and
body language.
Startups as religions
In case startups as tribes isn’t enough of a refactor for this audience, let me propose
a more radical one: startups as religions.
The familiar form of this metaphor says that organizations can be cults. Witness
Apple’s cult of Jobs, the cult of Bridgewater, “drinking the kool-aid,” etc. But while
it’s fun to use the derogatory term (cult), it’s a missed opportunity to reference a
much richer concept (religion).
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And so on. Startups can learn a lot from the sociology of religion. Unfortunately we
only have time to scratch the surface here, so I’d like to look at religion’s role in
caring for the collective interest.
Religions have endured for millennia because they are very good at what they do:
uniting individuals into a community with shared values, goals, and culture. And
if you think that religious beliefs are mostly nonsense, you should be even more
impressed by what religions have been able to accomplish.
Émile Durkheim understood religion not as belief in the supernatural (as the
popular conception would have it), but as a system of beliefs and practices relating
to sacred things. Something is sacred, according to Durkheim, when it represents
the interests of the group. Everything else is profane, i.e., unrelated to the group’s
interests.
Like a religion, a startup will care for its collective interest by defining certain
things as sacred. A classic example is the company’s logo. This symbol is, quite
literally, “set apart and forbidden” by brand guidelines, which often specify
exactly how the logo must be presented and how far it should sit from the other
elements on a page (thus separating the sacred from the profane).
A startup may choose to sacralize other things related to its collective interest, such
as team rituals or hiring and firing (determining who gets to be a member of the
community). Or it may choose to treat certain values as sacred, such as code
quality, product quality, or customer satisfaction. This kind of thinking is a bit
dangerous as it tends to ignore the existence of tradeoffs (sacred things are
considered inviolable), but it can be valuable when used judiciously.
The religious perspective also sheds light on why solidarity rituals are so
important, and so prevalent, at a growing startup:
Religion is, of course, a tricky proposition. If you take inspiration from religion’s
playbook, just make sure it’s not the page on orthodoxy. Once your community
decides that some beliefs are wrong (and punishable!), all hope for acquiring
knowledge is lost. To succeed in the risky, uncertain world a startup inhabits, you
need a community of free-thinkers, not true-believers.
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Endnotes
[1] I’m not the first to identify “tribes” as a useful metaphor. Seth Godin (Tribes)
and Dave Logan (Tribal Leadership), for example, have built whole books around
the term. I’m just pointing out that the formal study of tribes, i.e. anthropology, can
shed light on what goes on at a startup.
[2] Cultural guidebooks: Bridgewater, Netflix, Valve, and Zappos (see also
Delivering Happiness).
[3] There are many other ways to slice up cultural space, for those who enjoy such
things. E.g.:
[4] Be careful with status symbols. Status symbols create envy, making it more
difficult to maintain a flat, collective culture. Visible status symbols are especially
tricky. Examples include titles, desk location, parking spots, and office equipment
(fancy desks or chairs, size and number of monitors).
[5] Desk location is critical. A study done on Google’s internal prediction markets
“found that [knowledge and opinions] were most correlated among employees
sharing an office, that correlations declined with distance for employees on the
same floor of a building, and that employees on different floors of the same
building were no more correlated than employees in different cities.” If you want
people working together as seamlessly as possible, pack them in.
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Comments
Kay says:
October 29, 2012 at 10:43 pm
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company may be synthesized as a tribe with all the elements listed in the article but at the
same we aware it is none.
Going even further one might ask if the tribal holism isn’t basically an upper management
illusion we should believe in, something which requires a “Gervais Principle” sort of
deconstruction, instead of believe-making in the consistency of the concept, powered by
all sorts of references from sociology and ethnology, which is going to produce only more
“clueless” middle management guys. “Culture” smoothes out the fundamental
pathologies of the corporate organization by idealizing it, creating a human interface to
the mundane activity of working for money, extracting profit and solving conflicts among
adults following their own interests.
Robin says:
November 5, 2012 at 7:35 am
Tsk, tsk. Such cynicism. Let me guess: “I’m a software engineer, it’s my job
to be cynical. Otherwise I’d just be si ing around saying ‘I don’t understand, it should
just work.ʹ”
All culture is grounded in seemingly mundane activities (eating, cha ing with friends,
walking, falling ill, being married, etc.) so there is nothing distinctive about corporate
culture on that score. Moreover, culture allow conflicts to be articulated and dramatised
as much as smoothed over.
Of course, plenty of technology companies can appear very “happy clappy”. However,
a company trying to succeed purely by creating a shared, warm, fuzzy feeling is like a
marriage being based purely on being in love: it may be fun, but it won’t be strong
enough to survive misfortune. How a company deals with conflict is a mark of its
character, and that’s something that’s very hard to fake.
As Kay says, though, people joining a start-up generally aren’t in it for life. Hence, the
company can’t now be a “total institution”, no ma er how hard it tries. (Most are smart
enough not to try.) This distinguishes a start-up from a genuine tribe.
Start-ups come out of “scenius” more than individual genius, so loose affiliation —
especially between people in different organisations — is as important as close
comradeship. (Dumb, obvious examples would be found among the companies
founded by disillusioned ex-members of big, famous software companies. More
interesting examples are in the tangled “family tree” of search-related companies in
Cambridge.)
Establishing loose connections and acquaintances also involve “high cost signalling”,
although the costs have normally been occurred well before the benefits appear. Two
people middle-age men who misspent their respective youths messing around with
some obscure 80s home computer will, even on first meeting, quickly be able to have
conversations that will baffle to outsiders (“The guy who wrote the manual is now an
algebraic topologist”, etc.)
Here’s a more extreme case (from Mary Carruthers, “The Craft of Thought”): “[…] the
‘neck verse’ of late medieval England, […] enabled someone to escape hanging
provided he could recite or read a verse of the Bible […] The content of the verse was
almost immaterial; what counted was the articulation of someone’s ‘common ground’
with an educated class, who were immune from hanging because of legal custom.”
Where I disagree with Kevin is in his distinction between free thinkers and true
believers. Richard Wagner famously used the pseudonym Karl Freigedanken (trans:
Charles Freethoughts). I could tell you about what he wrote under that name, but if
you look it up you’ll see why “free-thinking” can be as morally dubious as anything
else. “He that hath ears to hear,” as we say, “let him hear.”
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This was a fascinating read on startups. The section on the importance of rituals was
especially eye-opening. Thanks for sharing it!
Kate
h p://katemats.com
This is a fascinating topic and excellent article. As startups grow and they add
new people, it becomes more and more important to formalize the culture and make sure
that new recruits “get it.” I have been part of a couple of start-ups where new teams of
“adults” or “experts” were brought in and it immediately changed the culture for the
worse in both cases the companies never recovered. Don’t underestimate the power of
great corporate culture!
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