I’m a big believer in the importance of corporate culture as a competitive advantage and often use colorful analogies (e.g., swarming antibodies, Lord of the Flies) to describe one aspect of the culture (mediocrity intolerance) that I want at Mark Logic. Slides 41-51 do a good job of describing what happens as a company grows — and as I witnessed at Business Objects — in this regard.
So while I’m not ready to sign up for everything in the Netflix deck, I think it’s about as visionary and practical a piece on corporate culture as anything I’ve seen. Truly excellent stuff.
I like the attitude and a number of the concrete examples that prove they're not just spouting theory without practice. But 128 slides to convey all that? They'd do well to cut to the chase of their concrete examples and compress the explanations. Specifically, they could compress sequences like slides 4-21 and 38-58, and instead focus on the actions that speak louder than words: their comp, vacation, and expense policies.Here's a test for this and any other culture manifesto: what parts of it would 99% of companies have no trouble agreeing with? Cut those parts out; it's the rest that communicates your distinctive culture.
The more neutral a company is, more customers the company should reach. A good company should be driven by the culture knowledge of cultural dependancies. Not so easy for business organizations, but far away for actual capacities of many governmental or not organizations
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, consultant, angel investor, and blogger focused on enterprise software startups. I am an executive-in-residence (EIR) at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to startup challenges having 10 years’ experience at each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director levels across 10+ companies ranging in size from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of cloud EPM vendor Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs in a competitive market, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of NoSQL database provider MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over 6 years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. I started my career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.
I love disruption, startups, and Silicon Valley and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, GainSight, Hex, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru (cybersecurity training), Jiminny (conversation intelligence), and Scoro (work management).
I previously served on the boards of Alation (data intelligence), Aster Data (big data), Granular (agtech), Nuxeo (content services), Profisee (MDM), and SMA Technologies (workload automation).
I periodically speak to strategy and entrepreneurship classes at the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) and Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC).
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I like the attitude and a number of the concrete examples that prove they're not just spouting theory without practice. But 128 slides to convey all that? They'd do well to cut to the chase of their concrete examples and compress the explanations. Specifically, they could compress sequences like slides 4-21 and 38-58, and instead focus on the actions that speak louder than words: their comp, vacation, and expense policies.Here's a test for this and any other culture manifesto: what parts of it would 99% of companies have no trouble agreeing with? Cut those parts out; it's the rest that communicates your distinctive culture.
The more neutral a company is, more customers the company should reach. A good company should be driven by the culture knowledge of cultural dependancies. Not so easy for business organizations, but far away for actual capacities of many governmental or not organizations