Category Archives: Culture

The Three Un’s of Founders

Posted on April 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

[Edited 4/16, see notes at bottom]

I’ve worked with scores of founders and companies over the years and I’ve come to make bright-line distinction between founders and managers.  Let me demonstrate it with a story.

One day long ago I was in a board meeting.  We were discussing the coming year’s budget.  The hotly contested question was:  do we spend $8M or $9M on R&D?  After much wrangling, the board agreed that we should spend $8M.  The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter.  The VCs left first and I was walking out of the room with only the founders.  The CEO said to the CTO as we were leaving, “spend the $9M anyway.”

My jaw hit the floor.  I was aghast, dumbfounded.  What the CEO said was literally incomprehensible to me.  It wasn’t possible.  That’s just not how things are done.

At that moment I realized the difference between a manager and a founder.

As a professional manager [1], we grow up climbing the corporate hierarchy.  We have savoir faire.  We know the rules.  We disagree and commit.  We horse trade.  We split the difference.  But, unless we want to do a deliberate end run to the person in charge, we abide by the decisions of the group.  We are team members in an organization, after all.

Founder aren’t.  While they may strive to be some of those things, in this case, the founders were fresh from university, with little work experience and certainly no ladder climbing.  This wasn’t some organization they were part of.  They started it, based on their research.  It was their company.  And if they thought it spending an extra $1M on R&D was the right thing to do, well, they were going to do it.  That’s a founder.

I write this post in two spirits:

  • To former-manager founders [2] as a reminder that you are now a founder and need to think like one.  It’s your company.  Your investors and advisors will have plenty of opinions but if you end up buried, you will be buried alone.  Unlike your VCs and advisors, you have but one life to give for your company [3].  Act like it — you’re not an EVP at BigCo anymore!
  • To investors [4], advisors, and startup execs as a reminder that founders are not managers, even though sometimes we might like them to act more as if they were.

Example:  a founder is raising a seed round off $1M in ARR and a VC is asking a lot of questions about CAC and LTV.

  • Manager response:  “Well, I know a CAC of 1.7 is high but we are ramping quickly and carrying a lot of unproductive sales capacity that hurts the CAC ratio.”
  • Founder response:  “This is a seed round.  I have two barely qualified SDRs and me selling this stuff.  We don’t have a sales model, so why are you calculating its efficiency?  The only thing we’ve been trying to prove — and we’ve proven it — is that people will pay for our software.”

The manager tries to be reasonable, answer the question, and preserve optionality in raising money from this target.  The founder highlights the absurdity of the question, wonders if this is a VC that they want to partner with in building their company, and isn’t shy about letting their feelings leak out.

The first example, combined with many other experiences, has led me to create the three “un’s” of founders.  Compared to managers, founders are:

  • Unreasonable.  Heck, the whole idea of starting a company is unreasonable.  Taking it to $10M in ARR is unreasonable.  Thinking you have the best product and company in the category is unreasonable.  Becoming a unicorn is unreasonable.  There’s nothing inherently reasonable about any of the things a founder needs to do.   In fact, that’s one reason why some founders are successful:  they don’t know what they can’t do.  Don’t expect someone take a series of very unreasonable risks and then be entirely reasonable in every subsequent management discussion thereafter.  It’s not how it works.  We expect every parent to think their child is the greatest and want what’s best for them; the same holds for founders and companies.
  • Uncompromising.  Managers are trained to split the difference, find middle ground, and keep options open.  In essence, to compromise.  Founders can’t compromise.  They know they will fail if they try to be all things to all people; they know the old saw that a camel is a horse designed by committee.  They know intense focus on being the best in the world at one thing is the key to their success.  If one VC on the board wants to go North and another wants to go East, a manager will tend towards Northeast, North, or East.  A founder — because in their mind it’s their company — will make up their own mind about what’s best for the company and potentially travel in another dimension, like up or down.  Getting promoted in a big company is about keeping those above you happy.  Creating a successful company is about getting the right answer, and not whether everyone is happy with it.
  • Unapologetic.  Managers are professionals who are paid to do things right.  Thus, they tend to count negatives like errors and strikeouts.  They apologize for missed quarters or bad hires.  Founders own the team.  They want to win.  While they don’t like errors and strikeouts, they neither obsess over them nor even necessarily care about minimizing them; they’re not trying to keep their resume free of red correction ink.  They’re trying to win in the market and create a leading company.  Errors are going to happen.  Fix the big ones so they don’t happen again, but let’s keep moving forward.  Yes, we missed last quarter, but how do we look on the year?  We don’t belabor the mistakes we made in getting to where we are, we focus on where we are and where we’re going.

I’m not saying all these un’s are great all the time, and I would encourage founders to recognize and appropriately mitigate them.  I am saying that manger-founders, particularly those who founded companies (or took over as CEO) after long successful careers at big tech companies, need to think more like founders and less like managers.

# # #

Notes
[1] Having never founded a company and as someone who has indeed climbed the corporate hierarchy I view myself as a manager — an entrepreneurial, and perhaps difficult, one — but a manager nevertheless.

[2] And, to some extent, first-time CEOs

[3] You are not living, as one friend calls it, the portfolio theory approach to life.

[4] Who probably don’t need the reminder, but the advisors might.

[Edited] I remove the word “successful” from the title as it was a last-minute, SEO-minded addition and a reader or two correctly called me out saying, “plenty of unsuccessful founders have these three traits as well.”  That’s true and since arguing that “the three un’s” somehow separate successful from unsuccessful founders was never the point of the post — they are, imho, what distinguishes founders (or founder mentality) from managers (or manager mentality) — I removed “successful” from the title.

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Posted in Career, CEO, Culture, Silicon Valley, Startups, VC

What Are The Units On Your Lead SaaS Metric — And What Does That Say About Your Culture

Posted on February 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Quick:

  • How big is the Acme deal?  $250K.
  • What’s Joe’s forecast for the quarter?  $500K
  • What’s the number this year?  Duh.  $7,500K.

Awesome.  By the way:  $250K what?  $500K what?  $7,500K what?  ARR, ACV, bookings, TCV, new ARR, net new ARR, committed ARR, contracted ARR, terminal ARR, or something else?

Defining those terms isn’t the point of this post, so see note [1] below if interested.

The point is that these ambiguous, unitless conversations happen all the time in enterprise software companies.  This isn’t a post about confusion; the vast majority of the time, everyone understands exactly what is being said.  What those implicit units really tell you about is culture.

Since there can be only one lead metric, every company, typically silently, decides what it is.  And what you pick says a lot about what you’re focused on.

  • New ARR means you’re focused on sales adding water to the SaaS leaky bucket — regardless of whether it’s from new or existing customers.
  • Net New ARR means you’re focused the change in water level in the SaaS leaky bucket — balancing new sales and churn — and presumably means you hold AEs accountable for both sales and renewals within their patch.
  • New Logo ARR means you’re focused on new ARR from new customers.  That is, you’re focused on “lands” [2].
  • Bookings means you’re focused on cash [3], bringing in dollars regardless of whether they’re from subscription or services, or potentially something else [4].
  • TCV, which became a four-letter word after management teams too often conflated it with ARR, is probably still best avoided in polite company.  Use RPO for a similar, if not identical, concept.
  • Committed ARR usually means somebody important is a fan of Bessemer metrics, and means the company is (as with Net New ARR) focused on new ARR net of actual and projected churn.
  • Terminal ARR means you’re focused on the final-year ARR of multi-year contracts, implying you sign contracts with built-in expansion, not a bad idea in an NDR-focused world, I might add.
  • Contracted ARR can be a synonym for either committed or terminal ARR, so I’d refer to the appropriate bullet above as the case may be.

While your choice of lead metric certainly affects the calculations of other metrics (a bookings CAC or a terminal-ARR CAC) that’s not today’s point, either.  Today’s point is simple.  What you pick says a lot about you and what you want your organization focused on.

  • What number do you celebrate at the all hands meeting?
  • What number do you tell employees is “the number” for the year?

For example, in my opinion:

  • A strong sales culture should focus on New ARR.  Yes, the CFO and CEO care about Ending ARR and thus Net New ARR, but the job of sales is to fill the bucket.  Someone else typically worries about what leaks out.
  • A shareholder value culture would focus on Ending ARR, and ergo Net New ARR.  After all, the company’s value is typically a linear function of its Ending ARR (with slope determined by growth).
  • A strong land-and-expand culture might focus on Terminal ARR, thinking, regardless of precisely when they come in, we have contracts that converge to a given total ARR value over time [5].
  • Conversely, a strong land and expand-through-usage culture might focus on New Logo ARR (i.e., “land”), especially if the downstream, usage-based expansion is seen as somewhat automatic [6].
  • A cash-focused culture (and I hope you’re bootstrapped) would focus on bookings.  Think:  we eat what we kill.

This isn’t about a right or wrong answer [7].  It’s about a choice for your organization, and one that likely changes as you scale.  It’s about mindfulness in making a subtle choice that actually makes a big statement about what you value.

# # #

Notes
[1] For clarity’s sake, ARR is annual recurring revenue, the annual subscription value.  ACV is annual contract value which, while some treat as identical to ARR, others treat as first-year total contract value, i.e., first-year ARR plus year-one services.  Bookings is usually used as a proxy for cash and ergo would include any effects of multi-year prepayments, e.g., a two-year, prepaid, $100K/year ARR contract would be $200K in bookings.  TCV is total contract value which is typically the total (subscription) value of the contract, e.g., a 3-year deal with an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K would have a $600K, regardless of when the cash payments occurred.  New ARR is new ARR from either new customers (often called New Logo ARR) or existing customers (often called Upsell ARR).  Net New ARR is new ARR minus churn ARR, e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, adds $2,000K in new ARR and churns $500K, then net new ARR is $1,500K.  Committed ARR (as defined by Bessemer who defined the term) is “contracted, but not yet live ARR, plus live ARR netted against known projected ARR churn” (e.g., if a regional manager starts with $10,000K in their region, has signed contracts that start within an acceptable time period of $2,000K, takes $200K of expected churn in the period, and knows of $500K of new projected churn upcoming, then their ending committed is ARR is $11,500K.  (Why not $11,300K?  Because the $200K of expected churn was presumably already in the starting figure.)  Terminal ARR the ARR in the last year of the contract, e.g., say a contract has an ARR stream of $100K, $200K, $300K, the terminal ARR is $300K [1A].  Contracted ARR is for companies that have hybrid models (e.g., annual subscription plus usage fee) and includes only the contractually committed recurring revenues and not usage fees.

[1A] Note that it’s not yet clear to me how far Bessemer goes out with “contracted” ARR in their committed ARR definition, but I’m currently guessing they don’t mean three years.  Watch this space as I get clarification from them on this issue.

[2] In the sense of land-and-expand.

[3] On the assumptions that bookings is being used as a proxy for cash, which I recommend, but which is not always the case.

[4] e.g., non-recurring engineering; a bad thing to be focused on.

[5] Although if they all do so in different timeframes it becomes less meaningful.  Also unless the company has a track record of actually achieving the contractually committed growth figures, it becomes less credible.

[6] Which it never actually is in my experience, but it is a matter of degree.

[7] Though your investors will definitely like some of these choices better than others.

 

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Posted in Culture, FP&A, SaaS, Sales, Startups

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The Holy Grail of the Repeatable Sales Process: Is Repeatability Enough?

Posted on January 11, 2021 | 6 comments

Most of us are familiar with Mark Leslie’s classic Sales Learning Curve and its implications for building the early salesforce at an enterprise startup.  In short, it argues that too many startups put “the pedal to the metal” on sales hiring too early – before they have enough knowledge, process, and infrastructure in place – and end up with a pattern that looks like:

  1. Hire 1 salesrep, which seems to be working so we …
  2. Hire 2 more salesreps, which seems to be mostly working so we think “Eureka!” and we …
  3. Hire 10 more salesreps overnight

With the result that 8 of the 10 salesreps hired in phase three flame out within a year.  You end up missing numbers and hiring a new VP of Sales who inherits a smoldering rubble of a salesforce which they must rebuild, nearly from scratch.  The cost:  $3-5M of wasted capital [1] and, more importantly, 12-18 months of lost time.

But let’s say you heed Leslie’s lessons and get through this phase.  Once you’re up to 20-30 reps, you don’t just need sales to be working, you need to prove that you have attained the Holy Grail of startup sales:  a repeatable sales process.

Everyone has their own definition of what “repeatable sales process” means and how to measure if you’ve attained it.  Here are mine.

A repeatable sales process means:

  1. You hire salesreps with a standard hiring profile
  2. You give them a standard onboarding program
  3. You have standard support ratios (e.g., each rep gets 1/2 of a sales consultant, 1/3 of a sales development rep (SDR), and 1/6 of a sales manager)
  4. You have a standard patch (and a method for creating one) where the rep can be successful
  5. You have standard kit including tools such as collateral, presentations, demos, templates
  6. You have a standard sales methodology that includes how you define and execute the sales process

And, of course, it’s demonstrating some repeatable result.  While many folks instinctively drift to “80% of salesreps at 100% (or more) of their quota” they forget a few things:

  • The percentage should vary as function of business model: with a velocity model, monthly quotas, and a $25K ARR average sales price (ASP), it’s a lot more applicable than with an enterprise model, annual quotas, and a $300K ASP
  • 80% at 100% means you beat plan even if no one overperforms [2] – and that hopefully rarely happens
  • There is a difference between annual and quarterly performance, so while 80% at 100% might be reasonable in some cases on an annual basis, on a quarterly basis it might be more like 50%
  • The reality of enterprise software is that performance is way more volatile than you might like it to be when you’re sitting in the board room
  • When we’re looking at overall productivity we might look at the entire salesforce, but when we’re looking at repeatability we should look at recently hired cohorts. Does 80% of your third-year reps at quota tell you as much about repeatability – and the presumed performance of new hires – as 80% of your first-year reps cohort?

Long story short, in enterprise software, I’d say 80% of salesreps at 80% of quota is healthy, providing the company is making plan.  I’d look at the most recent one-year and two-year cohorts more than the overall salesforce.  Most importantly, to limit survivor bias, I’d look at the attrition rate on each cohort and hope for nothing more than 20%/year.  What good is 80% at 80% of quota if 50% of the salesreps flamed out in the first year?  Tools like my salesrep ramp chart help with this analysis.

But all that was just the warm-up for the big idea in this post:  is repeatability enough?  Turns out, the other day I was re-reading my favorite book on data governance, Non-Invasive Data Governance by Bob Seiner, and it reminded me of the Capability Maturity Model, from Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute.

Here’s the picture that triggered my thinking:

Did you see it?  Repeatable is level two in a five-level model.  Here we are in sales and marketing striving to achieve what our engineering counterparts would call 40% of the way there.  Doesn’t that explain a lot?

To think about what we should strive for, I’m going to switch models, to CMMI, which later replaced CMM.   While it lacks a level called “repeatable” – which is what got me thinking about the whole topic – I think it’s a better model for thinking about sales [3].

Here’s a picture of CMMI:

I’d say that most of what I defined above as a repeatable sales process fits into the CMMI model as level 3, defined.  What’s above that?

  • Level 4, quantitively managed. While most salesforces are great about quantitative measurement of the result – tracking and potentially segmenting metrics like quota performance, average sales price, expansion rates, win rates – fewer actually track and measure the sales process [2].  For example, time spent at each stage, activity monitoring by stage, conversion by stage, and leakage reason by stage.  Better yet, why just track these variables when you can act on them?  For example, put rules in place to take squatted opportunities from reps and give them to someone else [3], or create excess stage-aging reports that will be reviewed in management meetings.
  • Level 5, optimizing. The idea here is that once the process is defined and managed (not just tracked) quantitatively, then we should be in a mode where we are constantly improving the process.  To me, this means both analytics on the existing process as well as qualitative feedback and debate about how to make it better.  That is, we are not only in continual improvement mode when it comes to sales execution, but also when it comes to sale process.  We want to constantly strive to execute the process as best we can and also strive to improve the process.  This, in my estimation, is both a matter of culture and focus.  You need a culture that process- and process-improvement-oriented.  You need to take the time – as it’s often very hard to do in sales – to focus not just on results, but on the process and how to constantly improve it.

To answer my own question:  is repeatability enough?  No, it’s not.  It’s a great first step in the industrialization of your sales process, but it quickly then becomes the platform on which you start quantitative management and optimization.

So the new question should be not “is your sales process repeatable?” but “is it optimizing?”  And never “optimized,” because you’re never done.

# # #

Notes

[1] Back when that used to be a lot of money

[2] You typically model a 20% cushion between quota and expected productivity.

[3] The nuance is that in CMM you could have a process that was repeatable without being (formally) defined.  CMMI gets rid of this notion which, for whatever it’s worth, I think is pretty real in sales.  That is, without any formal definition, certain motions get repeated informally and through word of mouth.

[4] With the notable exception of average sales cycle length, which just about everyone tracks – but this just looks at the whole process, end to end.  (And some folks start it late, e.g., from-demo as opposed to from-acceptance.)

[5] Where squatting means accepting an opportunity but not working on it, either at all or sufficiently to keep it moving.

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Posted in Culture, Sales, Salesops, Silicon Valley, Startups

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The Introvert’s Guide to Glad-Handing

Posted on March 24, 2019 | 9 comments

One day back at MarkLogic, we invited our local congresswoman, Jackie Speier, to visit our offices.  Regardless of what you may think of her politics, she’s an impressive person with an fascinating background including, for those with long memories, that she was the congressional aide shot five times and left for dead on the runway in Guyana when Congressman Leo Ryan went to investigate Jonestown.  I was looking forward to meeting her.

She arrived — early of course — with a few handlers.  We exchanged the usual greetings and took a few pictures.  Then, she said, “would you mind if I went around and met a few people before the presentation?”  “No, no — not at all,” I said.  Leaving the handlers behind, off she went into the sea of cubicles.

Affordable Care Act

What I saw next blew me away.

Cube by cube she proceeded, “Hi, I’m Jackie — what’s your name?”  “Great, what do you do here?”  “Oh, I see [from the picture on your desk] you have a son, what’s his name?’  “How old is he?”  “Oh, [insert something in common here].”  More chatter.  A few laughs.  “Are there any questions I can answer for you today?”

There are extroverted people.  There are gregarious people.  There are charismatic people.  And then there are politicians.  She was the best room-worker I had ever seen in my life and she did it as effortlessly as she did naturally.

“This,” I thought, ” is why you’re not a politician, Dave. You have no skills.”

But leading the troops is a key part of the job of a startup CEO.  While such glad-handing often comes naturally to sales-oriented CEOs, it usually does not for more product-oriented ones.  A sales-oriented CEO is typically an extrovert; a product-oriented one an introvert.  So what’s a poor introvert to do?

First, Run A Normal Communications Program
All CEOs should run some sort of baseline company communications program.  This could look something like:

  • Bi-annual kickoffs where the company is brought together to hear about progress, learn about new initiatives, and recognize achievement.  Think:  educate, decorate, inebriate.
  • Post-quarter all hands calls/meetings after the off-quarters to discuss company performance, progress on quarterly goals, and go-forward priorities.
  • Topical all-hands emails and follow-up live calls/meeting to announce breaking news and provide commentary.
  • Separate and/or built-in “town hall” sessions with open employee Q&A to the CEO and the exec team.

This is baseline.  If you’re not doing this and you’re over about 20 people you need to start doing aspects of it.  If you’re over 150-200 people you should be doing all of this and quite possibly more.

For most CEOs — even the introverts — this isn’t hard.  It’s structured.  There are presentations.  Most of the questions in Q&A can be anticipated, if not solicited in advance.

Management by Walking Around
Let’s say you’ve set up such a program and are getting good feedback on it.  But nevertheless you’re still getting feedback like:

“You’re in your office and in meetings too much.  People want to see more of you.  The answer isn’t more all hands meetings.  Those are fine.  But people want to see you in a more informal and/or 1-1 way.  I know, you need to do more MBWA — management by walking around.  You’ll be great at it!”

“No, I won’t,” thinks the highly self-aware introvert CEO, imaging a nightmare that goes something like this:

CEO:  “Hey, Bro-dy!” [Struggling to choose between Bro and Buddy.]
Employee:  “Did you just call me grody?  What the –“
CEO:  “No, Buddy, no,  I called you Bro, Pal.”
CEO:  “So, how’s my Buddy doing?”  [Slaps his back.]
Employee:  “Ow!  I just had shoulder surgery.”
CEO:  “Whoops, sorry about that.”
Employee:  “No problem.”
CEO:  [Notices wedding picture on desk.]  “Hey, how’s that lovely wife?”
Employee:  “We split up three months ago.”
CEO:  [Thinking: “I bet this never happens to Jackie Speier, I bet this never happens to … “]

Sure, the CEO thinks, let’s try some more MBWA.  Or maybe not.

Find Your Way
The problem here is simple — it’s a classic, in this case “reverse,” delegation mistake.  The well-intentioned feedback-giver isn’t just telling you what needs to be done (i.e., help people get to know you better through more individualized interaction),  they’re telling you how to do it (i.e., management by walking around).  So the solution is simple:  listen to the what and find your own way of how.  If you’re not a natural grip-and-grin type, them MBWA isn’t going to work for you.  What might?  Here are some ideas:

  • Every Friday morning do three, half-hour 1-1s with employees across the organization.  This will play to your introvert strength in 1-1 meetings and and your desire to have substantial, not superficial, interactions with people.  If you’re disciplined, you’ll get to know 156 people/year this year.
  • Management by sitting in the way (MBSITW).  Pick a busy spot — e.g., the coffee room or the cafeteria — and camp out there for a few hours every week.  Work on your laptop when no one’s around but when someone walks in, say hi, and engage in a 1-1 chat.
  • Small-group town hall Q&A sessions.  Attend one department’s group meeting and do a one-hour town hall Q&A.  It’s not quite 1-1, but it’s definitionally a smaller forum which will provide more intimacy.
  • Thursday lunches.  Every Thursday have lunch with 3-4 people chosen at semi-random so as to help you build relationships across the organisation.

So, the next time someone tells you that you need to do more MBWA, thank them for input, and then go find your way of solving the underlying problem.

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Posted in Communications, Culture, Leadership, Management, Silicon Valley, Uncategorized

Let’s Take the Cult out of Silicon Valley Culture

Posted on February 13, 2019 | 1 comment

I am big believer in strong corporate cultures.  Culture can be used to set powerful norms.  Culture can bind people in an organization to a common set of values bigger than their quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs).  Culture helps attracts the right people to your organization – and can drive out the wrong ones when they get swarmed with corporate antibodies for showing the wrong values and behaviors.

Culture, to paraphrase Henry Ford’s thoughts on quality, is what happens when no one is watching.

But never forget the first four letters of culture spell “cult” and too often, in Silicon Valley at least, corporate cultures become corporate cults:

For many Silicon Valley companies, culture is a point of pride and is meticulously captured in long slide presentations, such as the Netflix or HubSpot culture decks. [2]

When culture turns to cult in Silicon Valley, it’s often arguably benevolent – a strong leader espousing a visionary worldview combined with positive incentives for employees to spend as much time as possible with each other and/or at work.  The company provideth all:  free transportation, interesting work, fun recreation, great food, social events, perhaps (indirectly) even a significant other.  So why not spend all your time with the company? [3]

But sometimes Silicon Valley cults are not benevolent – Theranos being the best recent example.  Continuing to work in such environments, prioritizing the needs of the cult over common sense and business ethics can do lasting damage to your personal relationships, to your health,  and to your career.

cultsI first started studying corporate cults when Business Objects was competing with MicroStrategy back in the 1990s.  I found this book, Corporate Cults:  The Insidious Lure of the All-Consuming Organization, and had a few conversations with its author, Dave Arnott.

The first thing I learned from Dave was that, if you’re competing against a cult, that you should not attack it.  Attacking it, per Dave, only makes the cult stronger as the attack drives member together to defend the cult.

Consider some of the following similarities between cults and startups:

  • Charismatic leadership. Startups are often led by charismatic people, passionate about their beliefs and persuasive that the company is on a broader mission. [4]
  • Isolation from friends and family. This happens naturally at startups with long work hours, but is often exacerbated by the culture committee’s active social and events calendar.
  • Homogeneous recruiting. MicroStrategy supposedly preferred recruiting in its early days not just out of MIT, but out of one specific fraternity.  Many startups recruit similar people, all from the top programs across the country.
  • Hazing and rites of passage. Many startups have rigorous bootcamps where only the best get through.  Trilogy’s three-month bootcamp was the intense I’ve heard of.
  • Elitism.  Once recruited and having passed bootcamp, members are reminded of how much better they are than anybody else.  For example, HubSpot loved to tell recruits (based on specious logic) that it was harder to get into HubSpot than Harvard.
  • Specialized vocabulary.  At HubSpot, you’re not an employee, but a “HubSpotter.”  You don’t delight your customers, you give them “delightion.”  No one ever “quits” or is “fired,” former employees “graduate.”  How pleasant.
  • Demands for absolute loyalty.  Theranos did this frequently: “if anyone here believes you are not working on the best things humans have ever built, of if you’re cynical, you should leave.”
  • Excommunication of former members.  Former employees are more “dead to us” than “working somewhere else.”  Theranos was particular brutal in this regard, not only frowning on continuing relationships with former employees but subjecting them to constant surveillance and stunning legal harassment.

I’m not saying long work hours, free lunch, and and ping pong tables are bad.  I am saying that many Silicon Valley cultures border on cults.  Leaders should pay attention to this and try to avoid falling into common cult patterns, for example, by ensuring diverse recruiting programs, by building on-boarding programs that are more training than brainwashing, and by creating a culture that values dissenting opinions.  [5]

Employees should keep an eye out for lines getting crossed.  As they say with authoritarian leadership, it’s a boiled-frog problem — it happens slowly, you don’t notice any changes, and then wake up one day in an authoritarian regime.  Don’t let that happen to you, waking up one day to discover that you’re working at a malevolent corporate cult.

# # #

Notes

[1] Hint:  if everything is too secret, if management is routinely caught lying to customers and investors, if anyone who challenges management is summarily fired, and if you hear things like “if you don’t believe [our new product] is the most important thing humanity has ever built, you should quit now” – then you should probably go find a new job.

[2] Which nevertheless didn’t stop HubSpot from getting a good mocking in Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble.

[3] Some would certainly argue that even this is unhealthy.  Dave Arnott would argue there should be a line between “who are we” and “what we do.”  Even benevolent cults somewhat dissolve this line.

[4]  Which was so marvelously parodied in HBO’s Silicon Valley in a minute-long montage of founders pledging “to make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms” or “make the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints.”

[5] Which is particularly important in a culture led by a strong leader.

 

 

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