SHORTS | The Moonshot Phase with Tim Creswick

People often talk about maintaining culture, especially when an organization is growing. And I absolutely think a lot of the time maintaining the culture is the right thing to do, but so long as it's intentional and we've thought about the culture that we actually need, because the culture we need in a high growth startup, maybe in the first nought to five, seven years, isn't necessarily the same culture. We need to deliver the strategy that's going to give us continued growth in years 10 to 20. Right? That being said, what's the culture that Vorboss needs right now and what are you doing to build or maintain it?

So I think it touched on high performance, a high performing culture. We're still a growth organization, we're still dealing with the unknown. It's probably a tired metaphor, but it's a useful one. It's like we're still in that moonshot mode where, right, we've got something to prove. You know, I'm always fascinated that all that stuff around the kind of the Apollo program, putting man on the moon, it's such a lovely example of like, how an enormous group of people can be galvanized around a singular, very clear aim, you know, and those sort of anecdotes that come out of, you know, them asking the cleaner, what is it you do? And he's like, I'm putting man on the moon. You know, there's something valuable in that because it shows such a good understanding of the goal. But there's also great examples in there of sort of so many wonderful leadership things. And the other one I really kind of take away is this ability for people to understand how to sort of, given what we're trying to do, understand how that translates to what I need to do today in order to make us succeed. And the other bit is just being very comfortable that there were so many unknowns in the process. But it didn't change the clear understanding of what the next step was. You know, the next step was we need to figure out how to get something really big into orbit. And then the next step is we need to figure out how to dock two spacecraft, how to actually rendezvous two spacecraft in orbit. This is hard, right? They knew they were miles away from the problem of like getting to the moon and then landing on the moon and then getting off the moon and all the things. You know, they hadn't even designed the spacesuit yet. And I think that idea of like, that's okay, I can get my head down and focus on the next problem because no matter what happens, we have to Solve that. And I can't see my way to the finish line. But that's okay. I can still work on the thing that's most important. So culturally having people who are really high performers but also have that intersection with. They're comfortable not being able to see their way to the finish line, but have the confidence that like the team will get there and that it must be possible. And conceptually it's possible even if I can't see every step to the finish. And actually that's quite a rare. People who are comfortable in that environment, I've discovered to be something relatively rare. But if I may, on the point of culture, I think I'd probably go a step further and say I really think of my role and what we do as a business is, is building culture first and, and the business plan second. I sort of feel the other way around. Like if you get the team right and you get the culture right, then you can almost go and do anything, you know, then it's. Then, yes, there's a selection of, you know, what are the skills you've hired, but actually if you get those fundamentals right. And so I think I, I sort of massively over index on the cultural stuff because I think as long as I get that bit right, I can kind of fix the rest. We can train people, we can teach people, we can do all sorts of stuff and we can all learn. But fundamentally, like, you can't make somebody not an asshole. That's really tough. And if they don't like the unknown, you're never going to make them comfortable with it, really. So I think those are the things that we, I say sort of thing we over index on. But I feel like in assembling the right team, then lots of problems start to look very solvable. If you don't have the right team, that's just never going to work.