This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube talk titled "Dharmesh Shah: Misconceptions About Culture" (created 2016-02-13). The excerpt is a presentation by Dharmesh Shah about startup culture, describing common reasons founders neglect culture (perks, belief that culture is organic, focus on mission, and time scarcity) and arguing that founders should obsess about culture early because it shapes cofounder and early hire decisions and strongly influences startup success.
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All right, so the thing I'm going to talk about here is culture. And when I talk to startups, most of them don't spend a lot of time thinking about culture and thinking about people. It's like, okay, I'm going to walk you through some of the common reasons why entrepreneurs like culture. One is, oh, culture, we've got that figured out. We've got Margarita Mondays, we've got a ping-pong table, we're going to do Star Trek movies on Friday afternoons or something like that. So that's rationalization number 1. Number 2 is culture. Well, that's just something that happens organically. You don't create culture, that just sounds kind of creepy and kind of fishy, right? That's why we don't do that. And then there is one of my favorites is like, we're freaking changing the world, put it in the dental universe, that's our culture, okay. And so those are the kind of common buckets of reasons why early-stage companies don't talk about culture. And the most common one, and this is actually a legitimate one, is we've got 1,000 things to do. We're trying to raise funding, we're trying to build product, we're trying to find co-founders, we're trying to figure out how to replace the VP of Engineering that was supposed to quit his thing and didn't quit his thing, and like all those things that are happening in early-stage land. You don't have time to think about people and culture, which is probably the best reason. But I'm going to posit to you that despite all those reasons, that not only should you think about culture, you should obsess over as early in the process as possible. Because of all the things you will do, that will have— the time that you can spend, yes, build the product, but people is the thing that will cause the startup to succeed or fail. And the culture is going to define— we'll talk about this— who you bring in as a co-founder, the early team, and that's going to actually influence your overall probability of success more than most other things that you will do.
