Posts from Business

Last week I wrote a post about Networks and the Enterprise and I mentioned that we had made two recent investments in networks that engage the enterprise and that I couldn't mention one of them.

Well happily I can talk about the other one today. Pollenware announced yesterday that our firm had led a financing round for their company. Here's the USV blog post on Pollenware.

Pollenware is a really cool kind of funding marketplace. I've mentioned that we like peer to peer lending both for consumers and the enterprise. Pollenware operates a similar but different kind of funding marketplace. It is a marketplace that connects suppliers and their buyers and conducts real-time auctions for accounts payable and accounts receivable payments.

If you are a buyer and want to make a little more money paying your invoices a bit more quickly, visit this link. If you are a supplier and want to get paid more quickly, visit this link.

The thing I like most about this idea is the virality of it. If you are a supplier and you are participating in Pollenware to get paid a bit more quickly, you can invite your suppliers into the marketplace so you can pay them more quickly too. The whole thing trickles down from the biggest buyers to the smallest suppliers. Pollenware has some work to do to make their marketplace scale from the largest to smallest companies but our investment is a signal that we are highly confident they can get there and we plan to help them out along the way with things we've learned working with other marketplaces and funding markets.

Pollenware is located in Kansas City, our second investment in the midwest in less than a year. We are finding lots of interesting networks and marketplaces all around the country and all around the world. The opportunities are certainly not limited to the bay area, boston, and NYC these days.

We have five weeks (including today) before we start the sustainability course. It's not enough time to start a new series. So I've decided to rerun five posts on accounting and financial statements that I did early on in MBA Mondays. This is core stuff. If you want to start a business, run a business, and/or operate a business, you need to know the basics of accounting and finance.

So today we will rerun the post on accounting. The next three weeks we will go through the three main financial statements. And we will end with a post on understanding financial statements.

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Accounting is keeping track of the money in a company. It's critical to keep good books and records for a business, no matter how small it is. I'm not going to lay out exactly how to do that, but I am going to discuss a few important principles.

The first important principal is every financial transaction of a company needs to be recorded. This process has been made much easier with the advent of accounting software. For most startups, Quickbooks will do in the beginning. As the company grows, the choice of accounting software will become more complicated, but by then you will have hired a financial team that can make those choices.

The recording of financial transactions is not an art. It is a science and a well understood science. It revolves around the twin concepts of a "chart of accounts" and "double entry accounting." Let's start with the chart of accounts.

The accounting books of a company start with a chart of accounts. There are two kinds of accounts; income/expense accounts and asset/liability accounts. The chart of accounts includes all of them. Income and expense accounts represent money coming into and out of a business. Asset and liability accounts represent money that is contained in the business or owed by the business.

Advertising revenue that you receive from Google Adsense would be an income account. The salary expense of a developer you hire would be an expense account. Your cash in your bank account would be an asset account. The money you owe on your company credit card would be called "accounts payable" and would be a liability.

When you initially set up your chart of accounts, the balance in each and every account is zero. As you start entering financial transactions in your accounting software, the balances of the accounts goes up or possibly down.

The concept of double entry accounting is important to understand. Each financial transaction has two sides to it and you need both of them to record the transaction. Let's go back to that Adsense revenue example. You receive a check in the mail from Google. You deposit the check at the bank. The accounting double entry is you record an increase in the cash asset account on the balance sheet and a corresponding equal increase in the advertising revenue account. When you pay the credit card bill, you would record a decrease in the cash asset account on the balance sheet and a decrease in the "accounts payable" account on the balance sheet.

These accounting entries can get very complicated with many accounts involved in a single recorded transaction, but no matter how complicated the entries get the two sides of the financial transaction always have to add up to the same amount. The entry must balance out. That is the science of accounting.

Since the objective of MBA Mondays is not to turn you all into accountants, I'll stop there, but I hope everyone understands what a chart of accounts and an accounting entry is now.

Once you have a chart of accounts and have recorded financial transactions in it, you can produce reports. These reports are simply the balances in various accounts or alternatively the changes in the balances over a period of time.

The next three posts are going to be about the three most common reports;

    •    the profit and loss statement which is a report of the changes in the income and expense accounts over a certain period of time (month and year being the most common)
    •    the balance sheet which is a report of the balances all all asset and liability accounts at a certain point in time
    •    the cash flow statement which is report of the changes in all of the accounts (income/expense and asset/liability) in order to determine how much cash the business is producing or consuming over a certain period of time (month and year being the most common)

If you have a company, you must have financial records for it. And they must be accurate and up to date. I do not recommend doing this yourself. I recommend hiring a part-time bookkeeper to maintain your financial records at the start. A good one will save you all sorts of headaches. As your company grows, eventually you will need a full time accounting person, then several, and at some point your finance organization could be quite large.

There is always a temptation to skimp on this part of the business. It's not a core part of most startup businesses and is often not valued by tech entrepreneurs. But please don't skimp on this. Do it right and well. And hire good people to do the accounting work for your company. It will pay huge dividends in the long run.

Last fall I wrote a post on Sustainability and ended it with this thought:

I am tempted to develop a course on this topic. I think we need a lot more of this type of thinking in business. It seems in such short supply these days.

So I am excited to announce that I am going to teach a class on this topic. It will run the entire month of October and it will be integrated into MBA Mondays for the month of October.

I am using our portfolio company Skillshare's brand new Hybrid Class model so that anyone in the world can take this class.

Here is how it works (taken from this page outlining the course):

– This is a project-based class. You’ll work collaboratively with other students to complete your project at your own pace. Along the way, you’ll have project milestones, weekly resources, and office hours to help you with your project. Our project will be to build a "Sustainable Business Model Canvas."

– Every Monday morning, you’ll receive a weekly email with resources, readings and questions to guide you through your project. This will also be my weekly MBA Monday blog post for those who are regular AVC readers.

– Use the Discussions tab in the Skillshare class page to ask questions, share resources, and get feedback on your projects. You can also host or join a Local Workshop in your city to meet with other students in person.

– I will will host weekly livestreamed online Office Hours where I will answer questions, give feedback, and guide you to successfully complete your project.

If you want to take this class, you can sign up here. If you are a regular AVC reader or regular MBA Mondays reader, you are going to at least audit this class because it's going to be taking over the monday posts for the entire month of October. Either way, I am excited to do this. Sustainability is a big issue in business today and I think this is a great opportunity to get the key ideas and issues out there in a way that as many people as want can consume them.

Chad is the CEO of Etsy and I think I'll skip the intro because this post speaks for itself.

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Recruiting & Culture

When Fred asked me to write a guest blog post, I told him initially that I was going to write about recruiting and culture. Both are topics that I've learned a lot about in nearly twenty years working in companies of all kinds and contexts: public and private, large and small, struggling and ascendant, on the east and west coasts. As I sat down to write, I realized that how you recruit people and your recruiting approach defines and continually reveals the culture of your company, and it quickly became clear to me that recruiting and culture are yin and yang. In recruiting, a successful outcome usually means a candidate saying yes to your company, and at that moment, the candidate becomes part of the company culture. Below are some of the things I've learned to do over the years when it comes to recruiting and culture.

Make recruiting a top priority at the CEO level

Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner wrote a book about IBM's late-90s turnaround and said: "culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game."" The word "recruiting" can easily be substituted for culture. In my career, I've participated in a number of searches for HR executives and staff. Without fail, the least successful ones were those where the premise was "we need someone/a team to own the culture and/or recruiting." (This is a similar corporate pitfall to looking for someone to "own innovation" but that's another post.) A great head of HR is critically important but culture and recruiting are owned by everyone if they are successful. As Gerstner noted, one of a CEO's most important responsibilities is tending to the culture. To that end, a CEO must not only drive recruiting at the executive level but at any level where it will make the difference in closing a critical candidate. On a practical day-to-day level, that means that I will drop nearly anything I am doing to help close a key candidate. Talent is that important and it's always worth my time.

Communicate the company vision broadly and directly

In his legendary recruiting pitch at Apple, Steve Jobs said to John Sculley, "Do you really want to sell sugar water, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" A strong vision can quickly set your company apart from others. In his pitch, Jobs understood the power of the appeal to something larger than simple manufacturing of goods for a particular market. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." Jobs' conversation with Sculley happened 1-on-1, but the forms of communication available today mean that you can communicate the mission and vision of your company more broadly and directly than ever, which is what I did when I blogged in May about our long-term vision for Etsy. It has never been easier to tell your own story and talk about your company directly with the people you want to reach. Talking to the media is good, too, but traditional media outlets have their own publishing schedules, editing quirks, and editorial voices, so you should always keep a direct channel open. On a purely pragmatic level, communicating directly gives candidates a deeper sense of what your company is trying to do and they come into the process knowing what your company is all about, often self-selecting to your mission. I've found that this takes the recruiting process up a level.

Challenge traditional notions of corporate transparency

A compelling vision is just the beginning of a conversation. To be successful in recruiting efforts, you have to have tangible substance to what you say. Current and potential staff demand greater transparency into your company than ever before. Typically, candidates want to know two basic things about your company: 1) how is the company doing from a business standpoint? and 2) does this company operate in a way that I can believe in? The second is arguably more important than the first, since performance metrics rise and fall, valuations go up and down, and stock prices fluctuate. Culture and values persist.

Most private companies don't disclose any financial information, but for years now, we at Etsy have been publishing key metrics from the Etsy marketplace in a monthly "weather report." Our main goal in publishing this information is to let the Etsy community know how the marketplace is doing overall, but publishing this data also helps immensely in recruiting. When you're trying to convince a candidate to move across the country or choose between you and a company that holds its numbers close to the vest, providing this kind of information can be the deciding factor.

Measuring how a company operates from a values standpoint is much more challenging than reporting financial numbers because it is inherently difficult and there are few standards. Fortunately, new models are emerging to make such measurements possible. At Etsy, we believe that as a community-based business — a business where our company's success is entirely linked to the success of our larger community — our company should hold itself to a higher standard of social responsibility and transparency. We are not alone, and an entirely new form of business — the "benefit corporation," or B Corp — is developing to address the challenge of running for-profit businesses within a values-based framework. The non-profit B Lab has created a quantitative independent third-party assessment to measure companies' success against rigorous values and responsible practices. Etsy recently took the assessment and qualified to become a Certified B Corporation ™. Any potential employee can see how we measured up by looking at our score on the B Lab web site. We passed, but as you can see, there are areas where we clearly could do better. Diversity is one area for improvement, and we're actively and transparently working to improve our score. Recently, we provided scholarships for women to attend Hacker School to address systemic issues in bringing women into software engineering by providing training. We also announced our support of Code:2040, a program to increase minority representation in software engineering. We are doing all of this in the full view of the world. Over time, our community, staff, and potential candidates will be able to see how our company practices measure up to our stated values and where we are making improvements. I believe top talent is going to increasingly expect this type of transparency and companies that provide it will have a recruiting advantage as they compete against companies that are merely selling the metaphorical "sugar water" from Jobs' recruiting pitch.

Be patient: "Slow Recruiting"

Relationships are the currency of recruiting, and while recruits sometimes appear almost out of nowhere and close quickly, the truly great candidates can take a long time. John Allspaw runs technical operations at Etsy and I think John is the best in the world at what he does. When I hired John at Etsy in 2009, the near-term recruiting process was a few months, but the actual recruiting process had been going on for a decade. Nearly ten years earlier when I was CTO at Salon.com in San Francisco and John ran the ops team there, he came to me and said he needed to move back to Boston for family reasons, so he had to leave the company. I said, "Why? You can just work from there. We'll keep the same salary and nothing will change except where you work." John went back to Boston, the family situation improved, and John came back to San Francisco a year later. He never left the company and we made a difficult situation much easier for him. Since then, we have worked together at three different companies. Our relationship has persisted through boom and bust business cycles, massive upheavals in our personal lives, and changes in our business relationship. Looking back, I started to recruit John to lead Etsy's ops team when I found a way for him not to leave Salon in 1999. I call this (with tongue slightly in cheek) "Slow Recruiting."

Recruiting too slowly for key positions can be a liability in a fast-paced industry, but the larger point is that the way you and your company treat people over longer periods of time has more impact on your recruiting efforts than anything else. Whether it's making a tough situation like John's work and turning it into a win-win, talking patiently with someone at a conference when your time is constrained, or thoughtfully answering an email from a college student seeking advice, recruiting goodwill adds up over time. If you're just entering the industry and expect to be recruiting at any point in your future, I assure you that people will remember things you said to them fifteen or more years later. Keep that in mind at all times. It could be the difference in closing a key candidate ten years from now.

Open-source your culture: generosity of spirit

Most people really want to work for successful companies with really smart people where generosity and helping are the cultural norm. There are specific ways to institutionalize sharing in your company and demonstrate that spirit to the world, particularly in engineering where recruiting is most intense. In early 2010, we launched our engineering blog and named it Code as Craft, tying the mission of engineering back to the larger culture of craftsmanship in the Etsy community. Several months later, we formally introduced the concept of "generosity of spirit" at Etsy and asked every engineer do one of the following things within the year: 1) present at a conference, 2) write a blog post for the engineering blog, or 3) contribute to open source. Since then, the team has open-sourced 40+ projects, written over 70 blog posts, and posted over 50 engineering presentations, spawning a Code as Craft speaker series in the process. The team does these things because they love sharing their work, but as recruiting activities, they are incredibly effective because the software and information we provide helps potential candidates solve real problems. Cold-calling candidates doesn't come close to the warm intro of a candidate using the software you've open-sourced and thoughtfully explained to them.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Etsy CTO) says: "If your culture isn't explicitly leaky, if it doesn't aspire to change the world beyond the walls of your business, if it isn't captured in the product you're building and your users' experience, then it probably isn't culture, it's just cheerleading and team spirit burning up expensive inputs of time and company outings. Culture is lived, and it's why generosity of spirit is such a key piece of our team culture" (and therefore a key part of our recruiting philosophy and approach).

Cultivate the spirit of the organization

In his 1954 classic, The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker devoted an entire chapter to what he called the "spirit of an organization," writing: "Management by objectives tells a manager what he ought to do. The proper organization of his job enables him to do it. But it is the spirit of the organization that determines whether he will do it. It is the spirit that motivates, that calls upon a man's reserves of dedication and effort, that decides whether he will give his best or do just enough to get by." At the end of the day, a candidate will look most closely at the spirit of your company and the visceral sense he/she gets from visiting your office, reading your blog posts, following what members of your team say on Twitter, and reading about you in the press. It's hard to quantify this spirit, but you know it when you've got it, and you know how painful it is when you don't. When it comes to recruiting and culture, a leader is mostly responsible for tending to the spirit of the organization, and for making whatever adjustments need to be made to keep that spirit strong and powerful. In the end, that spirit matters more than anything.

Thanks to Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Etsy CTO) and Randy Hunt (Etsy Creative Director) for their feedback on this post.

I have written about this topic before but it's important and I want to say it again.

Investing in startups is risky. If you make just one investment, you are likely going to lose everything. If you make two, you are still likely to lose money. If you make five, you might get all your money back across all five investments. If you make ten, you might start making money on the aggregate set of investments.

The math behind this is pretty simple. If you assume that the average startup has a 33% chance of making money for the investors, a 33% chance of returning capital, and a 33% chance of losing everything and that only 10% will make a big return (>10x), then you can model this out.

All the profit in that ten investment portfolio comes from the big winner. If you don't make that investment, you would have made nine investments for a total of $450,000 and you would have gotten back $450,000. You would have been better keeping the money in the bank.

So you need to make enough investments to be confident that you will get at least one big winner. And so that means making enough bets.

There's another important aspect of this. You should invest roughly the same amount in every investment. Don't try to pick the winners at the time of investment by putting more in the ones that are "sure things" and less in the ones you are less sure about. The only sure thing about startup investing is that there are no "sure things."

Let's look at the same portfolio with a set of random initial investment amounts.

You can see that even with the same set of outcomes for each investment, the amount invested in each one has a big impact on the total return of the portfolio. It really all comes down to how much you have invested in your big winner. And since I do not believe you can predict which one will be your big winner, my view is you want to be as consistent as possible with your investment amounts.

When you are an investor, there are days when some of your investments are doing great and some are doing badly. If you are broadly diversified, those days are easier to take. If you are all in on one investment, then those days are brutal. Entrepreneurs go all in and are rewarded accordingly when they hit it. Investors should not go all in. They should be diversified.

I did an interview yesterday in Buffalo, NY where I was the past couple days for the launch of the Z80 incubator. Grove Potter, the Business Editor for the Buffalo News, interviewed me for something like an hour. It was a fun talk.

At one point he asked me about the issue of entrepreneurs giving up control of their companies to VCs. It's an interesting issue and one that I think is not well understood.

In theory, control of a company rests with the ownership split between the founder and the investors and how the Board of the Company is set up. If the founder/entrepreneur owns more than 50% of the company and controls more than half of the board seats, then he or she has "control" of the Company.

But in reality I have found things are very different than that. And it all comes down to two things:

1) How well the Company is performing

2) Whether the Company needs more investment capital and where it is coming from

I like to think about it this way.

An entrepreneur or hired CEO can own as little as 5-10% of a Company but they can control it like a dictator if they are doing a great job running the business and the company is making a lot of cash flow and has no need for additional capital.

An entrepreneur can control 95% of a company and all the seats on the board but they can easily lose control of the business if they company is floundering and they need more money and the only investors who would consider putting up money are the existing investors.

This extends to the idea of who sells companies. My friend Dave Winer put up an interesting discussion thread a few days ago talking about the sustainability of social media platforms. It is an interesting discussion and one very much worth having. In the post that kicks off the thread, Dave suggests that VCs are behind the decisions to sell/exit companies.

I left a comment on that thread and at the end of my comment I made this point:

I would be remiss if i did not take a minute to point out that you are missing the person who is the most important part of this discussion and that is the founder. In big successful companies, the founder, founders, and the teams they hire to help them run their businesses, are really the ones in control. The VCs are often "along for the ride".

VCs have control when things don't work. Entrepreneurs have control when they do.

That last line sums up my point of view on control and that is why I used it to headline this post. If you want to maintain control of your company, focus on running it well or find a team to run it well, and make sure you have plenty of cash to operate your business and that you never find yourself in a position where you are running out of cash and have nowhere to go but your exisiting investors. Do those two things well and you will be in control for as long as you want to be in control.

Hunter Walk has a post up suggesting that "social proof" is not as helpful of an indicator of startup quality as it once was.

I have always hated the idea of social proof. It's just the herd instinct at work. It's nonsense.

If you can't figure out why you like an investment and why it will be successful, don't make it.

Yesterday my partner Andy and I met with a company that has had a hard time raising capital. I talked to a bunch of big name investors about it and they all hated it. I told Andy "that makes me like it even more."

We may or may not make this investment. We have to do our work, figure out the market, make the calls on the management team, and figure out how big of a business it can be and whether we can make a good return on it. But we don't care who else wants to invest. In fact, I'd prefer if nobody else wants to invest in it. That would be great.

Make up your own mind. Don't follow the herd. Don't chase.

This is the third post in the MBA Mondays series on People. The number of people you have in your company at any time is a very important part of getting the company building process right. Too many and you will slow things down, burn through too much cash, and increase management overhead for no real benefit. Too few and you will be resource constrained and unable to grow as fast as you'd like.

I will say upfront that different types of businesses will require different employee bases and that my experience is really limited to software based businesses and within that sector, mostly consumer internet projects. So if you are working outside of the software business, I am not sure how useful this post will be.

I have a strong bias on this topic and that is that less is more. Time and time again I have seen the entrepreneur who wants to hire quickly fail and I have seen the entrepreneur that is a bit slow to hire succeed. If you took the time to corrrelate success in all of the venture investments my various firms have made over the years with one variable, it might be most highly correlated with a slow hiring ramp, at least in the first few years of company building. Being resource constrained can be a very good thing when you are just getting started. It forces you to focus on what's working and get to the rest of the vision later on.

I have tackled this topic of headcount before in the post on Burn Rate. This is what I said:

Building Product Stage – I would strongly recommend keeping the monthly burn below $50k per month at this stage. Most MVPs can be built by a team of three or four engineers, a product manager, and a designer. That's about $50k/month when you add in rent and other costs. I've seen teams take that number a bit higher, like to $75k/month. But once you get into that range, you are starting to burn cash faster than you should in this stage.

Building Usage Stage – I would recommend keeping the monthly burn below $100k per month at this stage. This is the stage after release, when you are focused in iterating the product, scaling the system for more users, and marketing the product to new users. This can be done by the same team that built the product with a few more engineers, a community manager, and maybe a few more dollars for this and that.

Building The Business Stage – This is when you've determined that your product market fit has been obtained and you now want to build a business around the product or service. You start to hire a management team, a revenue focused team, and some finance people. This is the time when you are investing in the team that will help you bring in revenues and eventually profits. I would recommend keeping the burn below $250k per month at this stage.

A good rule of thumb is multiply the number of people on the team by $10k to get the monthly burn. That is not the number you pay an employee. That is the "fully burdended" cost of a person including rent and other related costs. So if you use that mutiplier, my suggested team sizes are 5, 10, and 25 respectively for the three development stages listed above.

So 5 or less while you are building product, 10 or less when you are finding product/market fit, and 25 or less while you are working on generating revenues and locking down the business model. That's a rule of thumb for software based businesses that don't require a large direct sales force or some other significant labor cost.

Of course, there are all sorts of reasons why these numbers might not work for your business. This is just a "rule of thumb". You can use it as a baseline to think about whether or not you need those extra heads. But you might convince yourself that you do. And you may be right.

But above all else, restrain yourself from hiring early on. Just because you can does not mean you should. Team dynamics are easier in a small group. They get harder in a larger group. Things don't happen as quickly in larger groups. More management overhead is needed. All of these things work against you as a startup trying to get somewhere before someone else does. So hire slowly and wisely instead of quickly. You will be happy you did.

Kicking off our series on People, I am going to talk about the importance of culture and fit in the hiring process. What I have to say on this topic is mostly aimed at companies that are going from five employees to five hundred employees, but I do believe it is applicable to companies of all sizes.

I want to start with something I wrote in another MBA Mondays post, on the management team:

Companies are not people. But they are comprised of people. And the people side of the business is harder and way more complicated than building a product is. You have to start with culture, values, and a committment to creating a fantastic workplace. You can't fake these things. They have to come from the top. They are not bullshit. They are everything. There will be things that happen in the course of building a business that will challenge the belief in the leadership and the future of the company. If everyone is a mercenary and there is no shared culture and values, the team will blow apart. But if there is a meaningful culture that the entire team buys into, the team will stick together, double down, and get through those challenging situations.

So this is what you want to create in your hiring process. Some entrepreneurs and CEOs buy into "hire the best talent available" mantra. That can work if everything goes swimmingly well. But as I said, it often does not, and then that approach is fraught with problems. The other approach is hire for culture and fit. That is the approach I advocate.

Hiring for culture and fit does not and should not mean "hire a bunch of white guys in their late 20s and early 30s." Diversity should be a core value of the team building process. There are many reasons for this but most importantly you want a diversity of thought, experience, mindset, and angle of attack.

Don't hire a token woman. Hire as many women as you can. Don't hire a token person from another country. Hire from all around the world (and become an expert in our bullshit immigration system). Don't hire a token "gray haired" type. Hire up and down the age and experience spectrum.

But most importantly, hire people who will enjoy working together, who fit well together, who will make each other better. This is what hiring for cultural fit means. You start with the founding team and build on top of that. If your engineering team is serious and likes to work until midnight every day, you want to consider that when hiring new engineers. A new engineering team member who wants to go out drinking after work every night is not going to be a good fit on that team.

You also don't want to create silos in your organization. I see companies where the engineers sit on one side of the office and the sales people sit on the other side of the office. And it is like two different companies. That can create issues and cultural divides. It is tempting to set things up like this because sales teams are loud and animated and engineering teams tend to be quiet and serious. But try to connect these different parts of the organizations in as many ways as you can. Make sure everyone is on the same team and enjoys working together.

So when hiring, you must start with what you already have. Take measure of the vibe of the company, the work habits of the company, the strengths and weaknesses of the current team. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that is only half built. You are looking for the next piece that will fit nicely into what is already there.

This jigsaw puzzle analogy is why it is hard and a bit dangerous to hire up super fast. You can fit one new puzzle piece into an existing puzzle fairly easily. But if the puzzle is a moving target because so many pieces are coming in at once, it gets a lot harder. And it is likely you will make a bunch of bad hires who don't fit well into the organization. And when they leave the company, it will be your fault, not theirs.

It helps a lot to have a one pager that outlines the core values of the company. I just saw our portfolio company Twilio's version of that. They call it "Our 9 Things." I wish I could publish it here but I don't have permission from Jeff and so I will resist the urge. It has things like "think at scale" and "be frugal" on it. You get the idea I hope. This "guiding light" is a framework for the culture and values of the organization and each new hire should be assessed against the framework to make sure the fit is good.

You, as the founder and CEO, can drive this for a bit. Maybe up to the first twenty or thirty hires. But you are going to need help as the company grows because this is hard, really hard. So getting a person hired onto the team who is totally focused on the team and team building is critical. And make sure they are a good cultural fit when you make that hire. Because they are going to be the torch carrier for your culture along with you. It will be among the most important hire you will make in you startup. More on that to come as this series develops.