Founders & CEOs of Eventbrite, GitHub, Mozilla, & ALOM on Startup Culture

I'm really glad to see everyone here because the topic that we have today, building a great startup culture, is one that is often neglected when we do all these workshops on how to build a company in Silicon Valley. People will talk about go-to-market, finance plans, how to raise money, but at the end of the day, if you're actually going to build a successful business, you're gonna have to grow it. You're gonna have to build a team— and the key thing to keep your team together is not the salaries that you pay them, but the culture that you build and the kind of organization that ultimately grows from your original vision. So really glad today that we're able to bring together an all-star panel of entrepreneurs, as well as one former entrepreneur in the case of Dave, to talk about this topic. All the members of the panel have built incredible startup cultures, have dealt with the kinds of sacrifices that you as a founder may eventually face in terms of how to balance the input from the board and the investors versus what you think you need to do in order to build the best company you can. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take some time today. Uh, I'm going to go ahead and introduce the panelists, although most of them need no introduction. Uh, and while I'm doing that, I want you guys to think about some of the questions that you may wanna ask in terms of startup culture. 'cause I'm gonna collect some questions afterwards and then use them to help structure the discussion. So, uh, to get started, let me just go ahead and introduce the panelists. Starting on my left, on my left is Julia Hartz, who is the founder of Eventbrite, which has been named one of the top 5 companies to work for in Silicon Valley 2 years in a row. So that's a great startup culture that's been validated by, uh, by the press, in fact.. And we're really glad to have Julia here today because she spends a lot of time thinking about these issues. Now before Eventbrite, I like to share the interesting facts about our panelists. Julia actually worked in Hollywood where you may have heard of certain shows she was involved with such as Jackass, Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Rescue Me, and Morgan Spurlock's documentary series 30 Days. So, you know, interesting cultures down in Hollywood as well. There may be some good stories in that, but certainly we're glad to have her up here in Silicon Valley. Next to my left is Hannah Cain. Hannah is a very experienced entrepreneur who has been running her company, Alom, since 1997. And Hannah brings a wonderful perspective because not only is she an entrepreneur who's been running a company for the long term and seen how companies evolve over time. It's one thing to build a culture for a company that's been around for 2 years until it's sold. It's another thing to build a culture for the long term. But she also comes to us from outside the United States and has other perspectives as well. In addition to running her company, Hannah has been a board member of the National Association of Manufacturers and was the chair of the Women's Initiative. So she has a lot of great information and experience in dealing with other companies as well as her own. Over in the middle is Dave Kashen. Dave is a former entrepreneur. He actually started a company called Wellsphere that was successfully sold off that was a client of mine over at PB Works in the ancient days, and continues to be so, fortunately. Uh, Dave, after starting a company successfully, has in fact transitioned into coaching, and he now advises startups and venture-backed CEOs on how to build great startup cultures. So, he is in the trenches on a daily basis helping other people do this, and hopefully if you guys are able to raise funding, you can turn to him and get his help in figuring out the best culture to build. Next on the list is Tom Preston-Werner. Tom, you probably have heard of because he is the founder and CEO of GitHub, which now serves over 2 million developers, including every single one at my company. Tom also, in an interesting note, developed the Gravatar concept back in 2007 and sold that, another product which I use on a daily basis for spreading my wonderful face around the web. So, Really glad to have him here with us today. And finally, a former entrepreneur and today a venture capitalist, John Lilly from Greylock. You may have heard of some of his obscure investments that he led. Instagram, Tumblr, Dropbox. I haven't heard of them that much, but I hear that they're pretty good. John, before this, was the CEO of Mozilla. So he has experience building an organization that is both a large organization, one that's mission-driven as opposed to driven purely by profits, although that company continues to be wildly pro— that foundation continues to be wildly profitable. And John will be able to share with us some of his experiences in managing people who are going for a mission in addition to just trying to build something to sell. So that's our all-star panel. I'm really glad to have them here with us today. So let's give them a quick round of applause. Now before we get started, I did say at the beginning, I warned you, I wanted to get a couple of issues or questions, things that could help shape the discussion we're about to have. So anyone who has ideas, you may raise your hand now. Over there. Excellent question. Excellent question. Other questions? Again, we're going to cover them in the course of the discussion. We'll also open this up for Q&A at the end as well, but I always like having a choice of questions and ordering. And if there aren't any, I've had plenty of other questions in reserve. Over there. Excellent question. That's a good one because oftentimes people think of culture as this sort of squishy subject, but you're saying, "Hey, wait a minute. There are probably hard metrics." And I'll bet some of these folks have dealt with them explicitly. Over there. Chris, can you repeat the question? Sure. The question was how do you structure The equity incentives in a company that grows for a long time before it takes on investors, and just in general, how do you structure equity incentives? What role do equity incentives play in building a culture? Obviously, they play a role in Silicon Valley typically in building a company, but how does that interrelate with culture? So, excellent question. Over there.

Excellent question.

So the question is, how do you maintain culture when you have limited resources, i.e., It all sounds good to maintain culture when you're Google and you could spend an infinite amount of money on anything you want, but how do you do it when every dollar that you spend comes out of your own pocket? Okay, I'll just take one more and then we'll launch into the discussion. Over there with the phone.

How do you define culture?

That's a good first question. How do you define culture? All right. That is a fantastic set of questions and hold all the rest of the questions. We'll have time at the end. What I'm gonna do now is just go ahead and start the discussion process. And I think that first question is a good one to start with. How do you define culture? Who wants to start with that?

Excellent.

Microphone talent. So defining culture. So I define culture as the thread that binds everybody together. I think about Eventbrite as, and everybody at Eventbrite, the Brightlings, as being sort of this patchwork quilt, and culture is what binds each patch together. And that might be kind of hokey and sort of cheesy, but if you think about it, culture doesn't need to be directed from the top down. And at Eventbrite, we've actually made a very conscious choice to have it be grown from the bottoms up. And so the culture is what glues us all together and what bonds us, and it's really what creates that trust —and that confidence and that ownership that then allows us to face any challenge. And so without the culture, Eventbrite would be a very, very, very different company and likely wouldn't be successful.

So I mainly look at culture as two important— two things. What is important and what is acceptable. And those are the key elements as far as I see them. And I don't— I believe that culture should permeate the entire company, but I don't believe necessarily culture should start from the bottom and grow up. I think that culture is something you want to create and you decide what's important. You decide what's acceptable behavior within to reach that— those important goals. And then you You hire for that and you manage to that.

A quick follow-up question on that. So you guys have talked a little bit about building culture. I'd love— I think people would love to hear some thoughts about specific things that you've done, like specific decisions that come to mind that impacted culture. So some specific examples of how you enforced what is important or how you enforce what is allowable or not allowable. Does anyone want to share a specific story?

I see a lot of this, so I can share both sort of the general level and then specific. So I think some of the core decisions that impact culture are who you let on the bus and who you make sure get off the bus. And the values that determine that I think really shape your culture. Who gets rewarded and promoted within your company really shapes the culture. So it's the actual everyday operating decisions that I think most shape the culture. So let me give a couple examples. A lot of the startup CEOs that I've worked with have faced this issue where one of their top performing people, often at a senior level, maybe VP of Engineering, CTO, they realize somewhere along the way, you know, when they were 2 or 3 people, you know, it was working out fine, but they realize somewhere along the way that they're really not a culture fit for the kind of culture they're trying to build. And it is extremely disruptive to the organization to let that person go, and it's scary 'cause, you know, who knows if they're gonna make the next milestone, if they're gonna be able to raise more funding. And when they make that decision to let that person go, I think that's a really culture-defining moment. I've seen that happen a lot. And just one more quick story. I just heard this recently. A company where they were doing this big launch, and the team had met with all the big media publications, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, you know, Business Week, et cetera. And they said, "Okay, the launch is gonna happen Monday morning. You guys are gonna all have right to publish, you know, Monday morning." And Wall Street Journal called them up on Thursday and said, "Hey, we're gonna publish tomorrow morning, Friday morning, you know, before everyone else 'cause we wanna be, you know, have the first story or else we're not gonna publish at all." And it was a pretty big deal for them to have the Wall Street Journal, you know, report on this launch. It was a huge, you know, business impact. And the CEO said to the PR person, Well, one of our values is integrity, so what do we do? And the PR person said, "Yeah, I guess we can't let them publish." And they said no, and The Wall Street Journal just didn't publish. And those are the kind of decisions that actually, it is a real sacrifice. I think when you say you value something, it means you have to be willing to sacrifice something in order to honor that. So I think those are a couple examples.

I agree. Values are super important in establishing a culture. That really, for me, is the basis of it. It drives the behavior that then arises from those values. And propagating those values as you hire is really important. So concretely for GitHub, establishing our culture, which I see as being very strong and tight-knit, one of the things that helped us was growing very slowly in the beginning. GitHub was only 14— it took 2 years for GitHub to be 14 people, right? We're 125 now. 2 years after that, right? But the growth curve is very slow in the beginning and is now ramped up. One thing that we did in the early day was specifically let someone go. When we were about 6 people, we hired a sales guy thinking that we needed someone to do enterprise sales. Brought him on board, and while he was great, and I think he would have been good at what he did, it just didn't fit culturally, and we didn't understand what that meant for us at the time. And so we parted ways. I think that was really important. Like you're saying, you have to make those hard decisions —when they arise, if the values are different, right? Not necessarily better or worse values, but different than what you as a founding team want it to be, or how you operate, then you have to maintain that. Otherwise, there's not gonna be a specific culture. It will just be kind of everything. And then boundaries, very specifically. What is appropriate? How far can people push things? When someone new comes into your company, immediately they're gonna start trying to establish where the boundaries are. What can they expense? What kind of stuff can they put in your chat room? What kind of emails can they send? What is appropriate? Can they forward stuff for that their mom sent? Like, what is and is not acceptable for them has to be culturally established and they're gonna look for those boundaries, right? So you have to be aware that they'll be pushing them and that you'll have to tell them where those boundaries are.

I guess I should, you know, I think that's all exactly, exactly right. I think values are— values and how you make decisions are different than culture. I think culture is an emergent— is is an emergent property that is a result of how you work, how you make decisions, what you do every day. I think the culture over time emerges and becomes the substrate or the oxygen you breathe at a lot of levels. So it's a little bit hard for me to talk about as a separate thing. Like, there's sales, there's development, there's design, there's culture. Because I think that's not right at all. It's a thing that permeates everything else that you do that comes as a result of the decisions you make and the values that you hold, I think.

I'm reminded of— Plato's definition of justice where he said, "Justice is what's left over after you take everything else out." Yet it somehow puts everything in its place. Before we continue the discussion, I wanna just run two quick polls of the panel because I like to give you guys a sense of sort of what things people have dealt with. So one thing I heard was that sometimes you have to let a strong performer go because they're a cultural misfit, even if they're delivering on business metrics. How many of you have had to let someone go even though they were delivering from a business standpoint because they were a cultural misfit? So just raise hands. All right. Great. See?

We're just that good at hiring. I'm sorry.

It sounds like the guy you let go wasn't quite delivering, so that might be one of the issues.

So Chris, a couple of comments. First of all, there's a question about when to start building culture and things like that. And I think the truth is you build culture from day zero. The difference is whether you're conscious about it or not conscious about it. And whether you're trying to control the culture or you're not trying to control the culture. So just by showing up and the way you're showing up and the energy you put in it and how you prioritize things, you are building a culture. And so whether you're one or you are 100,000 people, you're building a culture. And I think the key thing is people look at you and you are the most important part of the culture. And you are set— you're not only setting the boundaries but you need to be able to walk the walk yourself. Nobody is looking at— listening to what you're saying. They're looking at what you're doing. And they're modeling your behavior, they're seeing what's acceptable and they're looking at what you're rewarding. So I think being willing to reward or unreward is a really important thing. So I did an acquisition and after a couple of days, you know, some of the people in the new acquired company started doing some rescue mission and they rescued a customer from failure and, you know, and I did my usual thing. I went and patted them on the back and gave them sort of their reward and made very public how they had, you know, helped everybody. And we did the rah-rah. A couple of days later, it happened again. Now, this doesn't happen so frequently in my company because we are into planning, right? And sort of third time it happened in short order, I figured out that part of the culture in this company I acquired was fire drills, right? And I had rewarded this behavior. And so I stopped rewarding the behavior. People got very upset of not being rewarded for doing the fire drill, right? I wanted them to start planning. I'm like, "Okay, I understand one fire drill. I don't I don't understand 3 fire drills, right? Let's start planning now, and I want to reward planning. And so being very conscious about what it is you're rewarding.

That is a very good point, and it ties into the next question I want to poll the panel on. What we've heard is that culture is emergent. We've heard that culture comes from the founders. I totally agree with those statements. I'm interested in finding out if you guys ever did— to what extent you were explicit about the culture you were building. To what extent was there a rule book or— to what extent was there a mission statement or a set of words on the wall to build culture? And was that effective, or was culture really something that just came out of what you did walking the walk every day?

So when we were about 30 people, we went through a transition. So we were actually 3 co-founders for 2 years. And to your question about what kind of culture do you create, I would absolutely agree. You are the culture. You're laying foundation that in hindsight you'll understand. Right now it doesn't really feel like that because you feel like you have to have a group. But when we had a group of 30, we raised our first round of venture funding. And that was a defining moment for us because we knew exactly where we wanted to go and exactly who we needed to hire to get there. And we were going to triple in less than a year. And so that hypergrowth totally scared the shit out of me and everybody else. And, you know, felt at the time that we would grow into this behemoth company and become something that we didn't really mean to be. And we would lose our identity. And at the same time, we did our first branding exercise. And we had our customers project back onto us what kind of words they would use to describe Eventbrite. And when I looked at the list of tenets, brand tenets, I realized they were intrinsically linked with our culture. They were our culture tenets. And instead of coming up with a set of core values and a mission statement around our culture, I thought, well, why sort of reinvent the wheel? This defines who we are and we are the group that made that product and therefore that should be what sort of roots us in hiring. I've never published those words in a book or on the wall and that is by my complete intention where I think that we started to, that small group started to hire into those tenets, those things that we thought were important and that reflected who we were as a group. And we walk the walk because we're hiring into that. As a company, if you look at that list, you go, "Absolutely, that totally describes Eventbrite." But I don't go around and preach it because I think it takes the value out of what those words are, what those values are. I'm sure there's a purpose around publishing a mission statement, but I think that if you walk the walk and you embody those tenets or those values, it's something that has to go unsaid and you treat your company like adults. You're not splashing something in their face that you need to abide by this. You're actually showing them through your own behavior and your own decisions.

I mean, I want to speak to that a little bit. Julia and I have talked about this before. I think, I do think articulating values that you don't actually walk the walk is the worst thing you can do. So I think that just breeds cynicism and resignation. And I think that has happened so frequently in so many different companies that there's a lot of hesitance and cynicism around kind of put values on the wall. I have seen a lot of cases where first of all just having the conversation explicitly and you guys have had it. Even with two people or even you and a co-founder by having the conversation of, "Hmm, what should our company values be?" That can be really revealing. You realize, "Oh, I thought this was the kind of company we're building. I thought this was the kind of company we're building." Good to have those conversations day zero as early as possible. And I have seen where the company did articulate those values and put them proverbially or literally on the wall. And it really was very helpful because it created more clarity. I think that in a group of people, the more that you can let people know what's expected of them, the easier it is for them to A, self-select in or out. So when people are deciding whether to join the company, "Hmm, is this the kind of company I wanna work in or not?" A, and then B, just to operate and hold each other accountable to those values. So I work with companies. We do, whether we make it totally explicit or not is a decision, but we at least come up with a clear list of values. And then often we'll go a step further and say, "Okay, well, what are the behaviors that embody these values?" And make those part of the hiring process, part of the performance management process so people know what they're looking for and what they're, and how they're expected to behave.

At GitHub, we do a lot of talking about the culture of the company and explaining how the company works. So I've spoken at a ton of conferences about specifically a concept that I call optimizing for happiness, which is a big part of what drives GitHub's culture. And it's important for us to communicate that because we do operate a lot differently than most companies. And this has been really critical. The talks that I've given, the talks that my co-founder Chris Wanstroth has given, and one of our guys, Zach Holman, the three of us together have spent a lot of time traveling, talking, evangelizing the way that we've built the company. And this has been critical in being able to hire well. You know, uh, everyone talks about having a hard time hiring tech people right now. We do not have that problem at all, right? And I think that's a very big part of why is that we do talk about it. We talk about it internally. We have a thing every Friday that we call Beer Thirty.. It's kind of an all-hands, you know, we're more than 50% remote, and so we stream it to the remote people, and it's recorded. They can watch it later. Part of the— there's a couple of things that happen at this event that are specifically about communicating our culture. One of them is— there's sort of 3 parts that it has. The first part is, who are the new hires? So introduce them. What team are they gonna join? What are people gonna expect that they're going to be doing? Just so that people are recognized as joining, right? So they're shown as being important enough to mention. Every week. Part 2 is talking about the things that we shipped. So anything— any big thing that was shipped on the site or within the company, internal tool, whatever, there's 5 or 10 minutes where I talk about each of those things and who was responsible for shipping them. This is kind of rewarding the behavior that you want, right? Shipping product is well rewarded and recognized part of the culture at GitHub. And then the third part is a philosophy section where I or someone else will talk about core philosophies of the company. So it might be optimizing for happiness or an offshoot of it. One of what I would perceive as the core values of the company, although they're not actually written down as such, but I'll talk about them a lot. I think this is really important as we grow and specifically because we've grown very quickly. Um, if you— for us, I've found that if you don't do that, then it's harder for people to interview. When they're interviewing people, it's hard for them to know what a culture fit means because sometimes people who are interviewing have only been there for a few months. And so establishing that has been important for us.

Yeah. You know, I think along those lines, you know, I think of the, the main job of the CEO and the founder at some level is to, to be the keeper of the narrative and tell the story again and again and again. And to tell the story in ways that are pretty similar so that people can hear the same story and get reinforced over time and kind of see, see the world you can see in your head. You know, I don't think culture comes particularly or wholly from the CEO. I think that's a relatively paternalistic way to look at things. I think that the most interesting cultures come because you've built a team that can bring in more people and can take the values from a number of people and kind of blend them together against mission, whatever your mission is. I do think that a lot of times the CEO's job is to sort out what's happening and sort out what you want to reinforce and sort out what you want to get rid of. But I do think that telling the story and helping people remember is key. For Mozilla, Mozilla is an easy case, but we did this, you know, in my startup Reactivity too, is I think it's really important to know what you're in business for, what you're trying to do. Mozilla was to make the web more open. And we said— I said that probably 100 times a day. Like, every meeting you have, you talk about— well, you try to teach people how to make decisions. You try to teach people how to figure out whether to hire this person or not, whether to write this feature or not, whether to commit this code or not, whatever it is. And you're trying to give people, you know, reinforcing ways of making decisions.

So I agree to the CEO being the keeper of the narrative, but— and I also think the CEO or the founders are key in establishing the culture. But I didn't want to be the one policing the culture. And I think that's a totally different issue. And so what I did was I pushed out to the team to be the ones policing the culture. So it's kind of a self-policed culture. And so I involved everybody in the decisions about the culture. And I think that when you look at what's important, it clearly comes from the founder's vision and the vision for the company. Of course, that's an evolving thing in a company. Again, I've run my company for 15 years now. It's evolving. But what's permissible? How do we do this? What's acceptable behavior as we are doing that? Very important part of the culture. That's something that the team needs to be part of. So we definitely have had and have exercises where we go through that. We are explicit about what it takes to make it onto a team. We have a process where we alumize people coming into alum. It's not like you will be assimilated, but we do explain what the culture is about and we also make sure to get their input into the culture. So we are very conscious about it when it comes to personnel issues.

One of the things I tell people about culture is you can tell you have a strong culture when individual employees will call the founder or CEO when they violate that culture. Because I found, I think, you know, John's exactly right. It doesn't necessarily just flow from the CEO, but it's very easy for people in Silicon Valley where we especially have a major cult of the entrepreneur to say, "Well, whatever the founder or CEO says, that must be our culture." So when you've been able to build a culture where people feel comfortable telling you, "No, you're violating our values," or, "You're breaking our expectations," I think that's very powerful. I'd like to ask a question of the audience 'cause I always like to do a little audience participation. How many of you work for a company or run a company where you feel like you have a strong and definitive culture? And how many of you people like that culture? Excellent. So I— what has— I guess the interesting question is What does that mean for companies that lack a culture? Do you enjoy working for companies that don't have a culture? Or do people feel like a strong culture is an attraction for employees and for people who are joining a team? I'd love to— we talked a little bit about some of the different things. I'd love to hear about the impact of culture on recruiting in some of your organizations because we've talked about it from the perspective of self-selection. Tom's talked about how it actually seems to help him hire. I'd love to hear more stories about culture and recruiting.

So in the beginning, when we started to hire into what we felt were those values, we were selling our vision and we were selling our values, and it was sort of like this future-looking statement where, you know, you're expecting people to really trust you and have faith in you. And, um, it was a humbling experience. And I think that when we realized we were on to something was right around 100 people, um, It was not an easy time to hire, and it was very competitive, and yet we were bringing in 4 to 5 new Breitlings per week, and it was, you know, everything from technical to marketing to support. And I realized in looking at the, at the stats that we were actually multiplying by network effect. So over 45% of our new hires in 2011 were from internal referrals, and that's when I realized we, we, that I had what could only amount to be my best silver bullet ever in recruiting. And, you know, I don't really believe in silver bullets. So I think that, you know, it takes a lot of hard work, and I didn't want to take it for granted. But I understood that we were actually competing within the marketplace because of what we had built and because of how we were hiring and our identity. And that continues to grow over time. And so now, you know, Kevin and I meet with everybody that we interview. We meet with all the final candidates. And, you know, more oftentimes than not, we're definitely— the culture is top of mind to that person.

Speaking about hard metrics real quick to bring that into the conversation. So we recently— because we hire a lot right now, um, and every hiring tool in the world is apparently garbage, we're building our, we're building our own as we do at GitHub. Um, and so we've built an internal hiring tool. And so a specific metric that you kind of mentioned is how many referrals are your existing people producing? —because once you get to a certain size, like, at first, it's not gonna be a lot of referrals because your network is small, if there's only 2 or 3 of you. As you keep hiring and establishing that culture, and if people enjoy it, then they'll start referring their friends, 'cause everybody wants to work with their friends. It's weird at first, because it's hard for founders to hire friends, because it changes the relationship. But as you're hiring people that have— that are a little bit later on in the game, they're gonna wanna bring in their friends. And so, —over the course of, I think, about a month now, 3 to 4 weeks, we've gone from 0 people in that tool when it was launched to it's like 110 right now. So it's like 110 people that— people within the company have added to that tool saying, "I want to work with this person." I think that's a good metric. How much are people asking their friends to come work for your company?

So just to clarify, because that's really fascinating. So what you're saying is you have an internal database where you said, Every employee, add the people you would like to have work for this company. They're not necessarily candidates who've applied for a particular job. They're not associated with an open— opening or a rec. They're just people they would like to see a part of the company.

Well, it's, it's sort of both. Uh, there was also a listing of jobs that we're attempting to hire for, specifically to get the job descriptions set so that we can reason about it. It's hard to hire someone if you don't know why you're hiring them, right? So number one. Like, this tool is to solve a number of problems, right? The job can then be attached to a candidate, but candidates don't have to be associated with a job, right? So you can have someone, and a lot of them, maybe half, are in there with someone saying, "This person is amazing. I've worked with them before. I don't know what position they would fit right now. There's nothing that looks appropriate, but I wanna get them in here and, and cast my +100 vote to say I wanna work with this person someday." So it's both.

Awesome.

One of the things about hiring is it sends super, super strong signals. So especially when we started scaling Mozilla, when we were 20 or 30 people, every time somebody would come through, I would sit in every debrief. And we would take a lot of time. We'd spend sometimes an hour talking about each person's experiences with the candidate. And we would talk a lot about what we liked and what we didn't like. And I think one of the important signals is that as the, you know, I joined Mozilla in 2005 and it wasn't as competitive, but as Mozilla we never really had trouble getting or keeping engineers either, like at GitHub, because of the mission, I think, and the way we worked. But, you know, over time you'd start to see, well, maybe you're competing with Facebook or Google on comp. And we tried never ever to do that. So anytime a hiring manager came and said, "Well, you know, they would come here, but they can get 5% better comp at this other thing." I said, "Well, you know, we shouldn't compete on that. We should compete on who we are. Let's see where it goes. And if it's a fairness issue or something they need to do because of their personal situation, you can think about how to compensate." But like, we never ever wanted to compete on the basis of comp, for example. And that's a pretty strong signal as to, you know, what you care about and what you don't. Excellent point.

Now, one of the things that this discussion of hiring brings up is, and we all know, it's difficult to hire. It's probably easier when your company is wildly successful and known to every single person in the world. But, you know, culture building doesn't just take place when you're successful. Culture building takes place when you're, you're 2 people, 3 people, 4 people, and so on and so forth. And a point that John made to me when we first talked about this panel is that culture is something that feels like it's easy to do when you're winning.. But there's times when you're not winning, and that's true for every startup. There's no startup that just wins all the time. I guess that would be the Charlie Sheen of startups or something. So I guess the question is, how do you work on your culture when you're not winning? When your business is struggling, what do you do under those circumstances to tell people, "You know, culture's still important. It's not something that we care about only when times are good." You've got to walk the walk, right?

And figure out what's important and what's permissible. And then when you are in that situation, you've got to make the decision. And it may be a really hard decision at the time. So when I started my company, I was in the situation I had run out of funds. And, you know, I had customers, but, you know, customers take time to pay. And it was pretty tough. And one day I walked by the conference room and there were 9 people or so in there and they had a wild discussion. And this discussion kind of went, you know, there was a product that was very, very minor defective. Nobody would have noticed it except for the top nitpicker, right? And she noticed it. And then there was another group saying, you know, we should just ship it. And group number 1 was like, you know, this is— there's a defect on this. And I walked by and they said, "What do you think?" And I knew that the financial decision I had to make was, "Oh, we just need to ship the product," right? But I knew if I made that decision, then I would not build the company I really wanted. So I said, "This company doesn't ship defective product," and I walked out the conference room and that was it, right? It was a really tough decision to make at the time, right? Because I knew it was hardship and, you know, I would have to go and find money to cover a couple of payrolls and stuff, right? But, but it was the right decision. So I think when you have the knife up here, that's, that's when you really figure out what you're made of.

You know, I, I actually don't think it's as hard, it's hard and fast a rule as that. So I think there are, you know, I talk a lot about sometimes what I call poetry and pragmatics. And I think there's the poetry of what the company culture is, and there's the pragmatics about the, what, what the nuts and bolts are, the, how the company actually works. And I think that Ideally, they're mostly aligned. I think that over time, sometimes you get— you move them a little bit. The poetry and the pragmatics get out of alignment a little bit. And I think that the companies that really struggle are the ones that are out of alignment for a long time or out of alignment a lot for a little time. But I do think that sometimes, just the way the world works, you have to flex a little bit and flex back. And I think that the more hard and fast you make rules, at some level, the harder it is to live the culture. I think the more brittle you make the culture. And that's a bit of a damaging thing. I think Google's "Don't be evil" is a good example of a really brittle culture-making point of view that becomes really hard when they flex in the market.

I mean when they're actually evil.

Well, let's just do a quick side point. Making slogans and stuff like that is dangerous, right? So if you're gonna do it, you have to do it well. And I think Don't be evil is catchy 'cause it's, you know, it's like, "Oh man, they're talking about evilness." Like, nobody talks about evilness. And I think that's for a reason. It's because it's a badly— it's a badly posed vector to say, "Oh, well, we'll just not be evil." So we can be like kinda evil. It's like evil is over here, but everything else is fair game, right? Like, if evilness is a spectrum, then as long as you're not the most evil, then everything's fine, right? So the way— and there's other companies that have things like, "Don't screw the customer," right? Things that are posed negatively like this to me seem insane. Because then you're just saying, "Well, let's— as long as we're not like totally, you know, screwing the customer, you know, we can be mediocre for the customer and that's all good, right?" So one thing that I present to the company as a core value is the opposite. And that's to create super fans, right? Because if you peg your metric the other way at the sort of maximum extent of what you do want to have happen, then people can attempt to approach it. That's a much more noble goal than trying to stay away from the opposite end. Sorry.

As a founder, you have to feel unconditional towards your company. And I think that that's something that I found has suited me well throughout the years. And I think that things aren't always great. I mean, we went through certainly our own set of growing pains. We grew from 30 to 200 in less than 2 years. And so at some point, you know, we all sort of stopped and went, "What the hell's going on?" And, you know, people were saying, "I don't recognize that person." and what are they doing? And it starts to sort of just build on itself. And I feel like having this sort of unconditional mentality towards your company and everybody in your company is really important because it really fueled me to go in and say, all right, what do we think is the problem? What's the perception of the problem? How can we fix it? And do things the hard way where it wasn't necessarily saying, no, we are this culture and so we're great. It's actually going in and being willing to unveil some of the things that need need to be fine-tuned, right? Or need to be talked about. And I feel like when you, it's almost like having a kid. Somebody could tell you that your baby's ugly. Nobody ever says that, but somebody could, behind closed doors they do. But somebody could tell you your baby's ugly and you're not gonna love your baby less. And I feel like that's how I feel about Eventbrite, where even if things kind of start to suck and things start to flex, we come back to center.. And most of the time it means going into the center and saying, "All right. What's going on? What are we doing?

How can we be a part of the solution?" You know, one of my favorite phrases that applies here is that you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic. And helping people understand that, you know, it's not that the company culture is really screwing you. It's like you're part of that and trying to help everybody understand that what they do and how they act and how they talk sort of reinforces the culture and makes the culture. I think that's pretty key.

I also think that culture is one of those things where if you, if, one of the reasons to focus on culture and building a strong culture is because you'll have hard times, right? I think the companies that failed to build a strong culture, when, you know, when they're winning, great, everyone's happy because they're making lots of money, right? And that will motivate you for a while. But the day or the week or the months that, you know, they're not winning, that's when the culture really matters 'cause you'll see if people will stick with it. I also think that it's, it's sort of valuable unto itself. I saw a video recently with Ben Horowitz and he made the point that if you're really successful and you haven't built a great culture, great, you've just made a whole bunch of people's lives miserable. We spend the majority of our waking hours at work, right? So if you don't create a great place to work, like, what have you created in the world?

Not that we're gonna name any names of companies, but there are some that seem to appear in the press a lot. For having at least at one point been financially sexual— successful, but on the other hand, having apparently a culture that most of the people did not like, and those people left as soon as that company's stock price tanked.

Well, there's a— there's a— I think a lot of that has to do with short-term versus long-term sort of planning. Like, you can make a lot of money and do all kinds of things that would maybe be noted as successful if you plan for the short term and you execute them. But at what cost, right? Always ask yourself, like, what is the real cost? Because the cost is— it's gonna cost you potentially to do that, right? Like, you drive people into the ground working too hard. Uh, you make compromises on selling your product or selling a product that doesn't exist yet, and then drive your developers crazy because now they have to build that thing that they don't really— they're not on board with. Like, that is a real danger in sales. And how that affects culture. And right now we're dealing a little bit with how that's gonna be at GitHub because we have an enterprise product now and we have a sales team that services that and also the dot-com product. It's still very small. It's only about 4 or 5 people. But as we grow that team, how the sales process affects the product is really important, right? So we could go out and sell millions of dollars of enterprise right now if we wanted to., right? By just making all the promises in the world to everyone. We would just— it would be unbelievable how much money we would make doing that, right? But you'd find, I think we would find, that within 6 months to a year, the culture would start degrading. The company would start degrading. And a couple of years from now, it would just be a disaster, right? Because we— it would mean that we could no longer hire the best technical people, because they're now subject to a sales-driven process, and that's the worst, right? So we constantly turn down customers for Enterprise by saying, "Judge and evaluate the product based on what it contains right now, right? We're not going to make you any promises at all." We basically don't show them a roadmap. We don't give them anything. If any of you have here— have bought Enterprise, you have— you will have that experience, right? And it's because we will suffer the short-term pain of not making that money, for the long-term benefits of creating a product that has a much longer-lasting lifetime and can be built by a better set of developers, right? So you have to— that has to be— like, that's one of our cultural values. We will turn down very large customers because we can't serve the thing that they want right now.

Now, one— we've talked about culture at a variety of different phases of a startup's life. Couple founders, struggling times, growth, expansion. I know that you've been through this, Dave, and John, you've certainly seen this as an investor. You build this strong culture, and then someday someone comes along and says, "Hey, I like what you've built. I'd like to make it a part of my company." Hannah, you've acquired people. So how do you think about culture and how it interrelates to the ultimate exit, uh, acquisition, or, or what have you?

Well, A lot of people say if you buy a company, an operating company, and you don't buy it for the IP or for that matter for some very specific technical expertise, all you're buying is culture. All you're buying is culture and the way people interact and the way the promise you have, the client promise, customer promise you have made. It's all part of a culture and relationship. And so I think that's really important. I feel that I have a promise to my staff members, right? I have a promise that if I ever want to exit, then I'm making sure that they are okay. And I know that a lot of founders feel that way, right? You know, the people who have been down in the trenches with you, you're not going to send them to somebody whose motto is, "We will be evil." So you really want to do right by them. So, you know, I think when you do the acquisition, I learned the hard way, when you do the acquisition, make sure it's a cultural fit. If you sell and you want to do right by your staff, make sure it's a cultural fit for them, right? The Platinum Rule, don't do what's right for you, don't do what's right for them. So, you know, I think it's doable to do a sale under those circumstances. I think it's hard once you've if you build a very succinct culture?

Let's see, a few things. First, I wouldn't say it's fair to characterize the culture we built as really strong. I think we built a so-so culture. I think that a lot of my lessons about culture came from doing it wrong, not from having figured out how to do it perfectly. And so I have some deep scars and lessons from that. And then since then, I've really studied and tried to learn by helping others do it and studying the companies that have done this really well. But I think an interesting perspective to give around this is the decision to sell the company for me was in large part around how passionate was I about the mission and vision that we were pursuing. And we actually pivoted, to use that fun Silicon Valley buzzword. So originally, our original business model was about working within enterprises and helping people make healthier lifestyle choices, which is something I'm really passionate about. And then we pivoted to more of a classic consumer health model, like sort of a next-generation WebMD. For whatever reason, I'm not particularly passionate about kind of medicine and helping people get from like -5 to 0. I like the sort of 0 to 10, 2 to 10. And so part of my decision was, am I really passionate to, you know, charge forward toward that next funding milestone, or am I at a point where I'd rather to kind of move on and everyone within our company had to make that same decision 'cause we made it together. So I think it speaks to the importance of the trade-offs that you make. I think to a point you were making earlier, there's, you could think about it in terms of your major stakeholders, shareholders, your team, and your customer. And I think often we make decisions even around mission, right, with like Lean Startup, like okay, let's find something that our customers really want. But if you're— if there's no overlap between what your team is really passionate to build and what your customers want, and you're just focusing on what your customers want or what the market wants or what you think you can make money doing, I think it's, uh, at best, a risky strategy.

Yeah, and I guess, I mean, you pointed out me in the question as an investor, and, you know, we sold my startup to Cisco, uh, a few years ago, too. I don't think I have a very good answer to this. I've never built a company with the thought of that we'll have an exit eventually, that we'll sell to a company. I think it's important to know that things change. Like, nothing stays the same. And so there's a— you're always at a point in time. You have a point in time in management team, a point in time of growth, a point in time of team. And things will change with whether you sell to another company or not. You know, I think that, you know, we were involved in Instagram. We wired the money on Thursday, and Kevin called me on Monday to tell me they were getting acquired by Facebook. So that was an unusual situation, but it obviously wasn't— wasn't quite what we wanted, what we were planning. Um, you know, we helped Gowalla, uh, get acquired by Facebook too. Um, you know, I think that sometimes you'll live with an independent culture like Instagram seems to be doing, uh, going forward. Sometimes you'll be assimilated by Gowalla, like Gowalla, uh, was. It all just kind of depends.

One of the, one of the stories that always comes to mind, uh, thinking about it because of your, your fellow partner at Greylock, Aneel,, who was part of a famous culture fight. PeopleSoft, built by Dave Duffield, famously had a very warm and inclusive and family culture, and was subject to a hostile takeover by Oracle, which famously does not have a warm and nurturing and familial culture. And, you know, what's interesting is just, you know, the— what you take away from it is that you— if you're a publicly traded company, you can always be bought.. And what Dave and Aneel decided to do then is to build another company, Workday, that could reflect their culture. That was ultimately what they ended up doing. And part of that is Silicon Valley is sort of a serial thing. I mean, you may start a company, that company may be acquired, you may then start another company. There are many, many serial entrepreneurs, and the one thread that may go from company to company as you do this is the culture that you bring with you. So with that, I'm going to close this sort of structured area. I want to again thank the panelists greatly. And now what we're going to do is open it up to questions. So all of you who have been saving up, I've even seen some hands go up quickly at various points in time, now's your chance. All right, back there. Can you talk about a great example of GitHub as a customer? So talk about your Google culture in terms of listening to a customer, especially in the Valley when sometimes the technology is either in search of a customer or the technology is a bit ahead of where the customer perceives their needs are right now. So can you talk a little bit about managing customer expectations? Great. So the question is, how does culture and managing customer expectations work together?

So I'll start while the others think, because my company is probably very different from everybody else's up here in that we have very few very large customers. And it's been probably, I'd say, 50% of our company culture and explicit— explicitity around company culture is around the client interface. And how we deal with customers and how we deal with customers who are pushing us over the edge, which happens on a regular basis. You know, and how do we— what do we do then? How do we make sure that they are satisfied, that they are happy? How do we reward based on that? So we have different feedback systems. We do formal surveys. We do business reviews with the clients. We have a total feedback system set up to make sure that they are happy. And then we have internal follow-up going such that when we get feedback that— and we typically know like a customer will have pushed us over the edge. We had a situation last week. Somebody had to ship some very, very difficult shipments globally. 3,000 shipments needed to arrive arrive at a certain time. And then they made changes while they were in transit. And we had to stop the planes. And, you know, and the team, I had 8 people working on the project. And the team was working 24/7. I had one team member work 31 hours in a row. And we know something is wrong, right? And then we will sit down and we'll figure out, okay, so how do we deal with that? Systems, people, Processes, what do we do now? So we have a very close feedback on that and then our reward system is tied into that.

To clarify on GitHub specifically and how we deal with the feedback and giving customers what they want. So it's not like we just ignore our customers. We're like, "Ah, we just build what we want and you know, you're in or you're not." I mean, it's kind of— I mean, we do do that, but it's a bit more thoughtful. —then that's— Don't tell our customers. So, we have— we talk to our customers all the time, as much as possible. We hold what we call Drink Ups, which are like meetups except you're drinking. So, they're at bars and we invite customers. And anytime we're traveling or people are giving a talk at a conference somewhere in the world, we like to hold a Drink Up, right? So, it's go to a bar, invite all the developers around to come and drink free beer, right? So, that's the concept. And in that— in doing that, you can talk face-to-face about how they're using GitHub, what they love about it, what they hate about it. You know, you get a lot of feature requests that way. You get a general sense of how people are using the product and what they love and what they don't, right? We also have a support team and a support line where people can email in and say whatever it is that they want. A lot of them are feature requests. A lot of them are bugs, conceptual misunderstandings of how the product works, et cetera, right? So you take all of that information and you think about, "Okay, what are they— what is the customer trying to communicate?" What is it? 'Cause they'll often— a feature request will be, you know, "Add another checkbox so I can make this thing happen," right? But that's not necessarily the best way to do it. That's just how they conceive of it in the short amount of time they have to think about it. Like, "If only I had this one checkbox that added this crazy option." And then, you know, if you do that, you'll have a page with, like, you know, 1,000 checkboxes for your notification system, like some companies have that are terrible. And, like, that doesn't work, right? So what you have to do, and how I like to pose it, is, Listen to your customers, but don't give them what they ask for. Give them what they want. And that's what we try to do.

Next question. You managed to get your hand up pretty quickly.

So, I mean, obviously entrepreneurship is very sexy these days.

It's always sexy.

Well, I don't think that's true, but it's very sexy now.

And I would bet that half —people in this room have day jobs and are sort of in the third something.

And I just wondered, like, what the effect of everyone wanting to be a chief but not necessarily being able to run the business. Excellent question. So the question is, when everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, how does that impact your culture?

I think that there's certain ways in which we cultivate that within Eventbrite. So we have, you know, like community managers we call them event evangelists who are in city, who are in market, and they are quite literally their own entrepreneur, right? We have a culture that also really does value entrepreneurship, and this actually comes directly from our CEO, Kevin, who, you know, it's a double-edged sword because if anybody comes to him and says, I want to start my own company, they will be met with like, open arms, like, "How can I help?" And obviously, as his counterpart, I'm sort of like, "Okay." But that's his choice, and that's the tone he wants to set, and that's the commitment he wants to make, and I support that. But you can't have it both ways, right? So it has to be unconditional. And I think that there's ways in which you can create an entrepreneurial spirit within a culture by saying, "Make it happen. Go get shit done." "You know, and for, at Eventbrite, it's making it happen means you're killing it in your day job, right? And then you're also going out and you're doing something else that's really awesome and we're gonna support you." But I'm not gonna lie and say that's easy because of course you sort of, you create their own exit plan for them.

Let me just quickly speak to that. There's a great book by Dan Pink called Drive. And he talks all about kind of intrinsic motivation and essentially that It was fine in the industrial age to just whip people into doing stuff because if people are just trying to make widgets, you can actually make them go faster if you whip them, carrots and sticks, not literally whip them, hopefully. But you can't force creativity from people. You can't like, "Be creative, be more creative, be creative faster." It doesn't work. That's part of the reason why I think culture is becoming increasingly important. But to speak to that point, so the 3 things that he says are important intrinsic motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. So in many ways, the characters of entrepreneurship— so I think it's incumbent on all of, you know, all business leaders to figure out how do you create an environment where your people have the right level of autonomy, mastery, and purpose so they kind of feel entrepreneurial within the company.

Excellent. Excellent. Now I wanna cover this half of the room because that— those folks have gotten— over there in the front.

Yeah, I have a question that I work for a couple of entrepreneurs closely. I was the executive assistant and also quality assurance and software development.

I run into some challenges with company culture is how to balance the work and life.

And that is so critical, especially in software development. And we run into the problem problem that the founder was working over, you know, the whole night.

So that because of his behavior and drive the rest of the developers doing the same thing, I am wearing the quality hat.

I was waving the red flag because that 2-day crunch turned into 2-week crunch and 2-week crunch turned into 2 months. He has redone the design from scratch.

And I said, this is not the way to do it. From the very beginning, I am in a dilemma. How should I handle a situation like this?

Because I want the company I work for to succeed.

But I clearly see there is something is not really right. We must have a balance. I mean, if just passion and the drive to succeed alone is not going to make it, and we are human beings, and humanity has to be there, and we want to deliver quality products rather than, OK, here, out the door, we deliver, we made it. It's not the way to do it. I see why.

And that's why the company is going down. Gotcha. So very passionate. So this is an excellent question because we often, in other industries, we have this concept of face time. Management consultancies and investment banks where it's like, oh, the boss gets in at 8, so I'd better get in at 7:30. Oh, the boss leaves at 7, so I better leave at 7:30. So the actions that founders take have a significant impact on what your culture says about the working hours and work-life balance. So what do people take— what are people's take on that?

So I think that there are sprinters and there are marathoners, right? And if you want to run a marathon and not be a sprinter, find a company that's a marathoner and not a sprinter, right? So I do think that the Silicon Valley, a lot of the startup culture is Sprinters, right? Build a company, build it fast, 1 to 2 years, get out, right? And that's a sprint thing, right? I've been doing mine for 15 years. That's a marathon thing, right? And so, I mean, I personally am on a European vacation schedule, right? And what can I say, right? It's important for me to have some balance and it's important for me that my staff has some balance. And so I'll kick them out if they don't take vacation. They have to take vacation. They have to take vacation. You lock them out. Absolutely. I mean, they have— they get fired if they don't take vacation, right? I mean, you know.

Over there and then I'll hit the back.

I just want to ask Tom, so you know, the— the previous one where you were very tiny team, right? With a lot of different engineers and technical guys. But now you're a big, great amount of cloud engineers, and I struggle to understand it. I didn't start, it's your purpose. But it just tells us you just turn out a lot of lines, you just turn out a lot of customers. So how much lines do you sell per day? —different culture, how to combine the two? Okay, it's the culture. I don't want to sell so aggressively, I have to make a very revelation, how to classify that?

Since it's very different. Right. So the question is, when you have an engineering-driven culture and then you begin to bring in sales, how do you reconcile those two different cultures? How do you reconcile that transition?

So what we've done is do a lot of thinking about this and approach it from first principles, which is what we try to do with everything. And so we went back and we said, "OK, what kind of people do we want our salespeople to be?" Uh, "What do we want that process to look like?" And we want it to be very friendly for the customer. We want to give people the product that exists now. We want the salespeople to be comfortable selling the customer the best thing. Sometimes that means taking an enterprise interest, like an enterprise lead, Those deals can be upwards of millions of dollars each. Sometimes it involves taking those people and saying, "You know, you don't really need Enterprise. Like, you're a team of 5 to 10 people. What you really want is .com. So we'll send them over there." So instead of making more money off them by selling them Enterprise, which is a worse fit for their needs, we'd rather shuttle them over to .com, right? And the way that we can make that happen is by not doing commission-based sales. So we hire salespeople and compensate them the same way that engineers are compensated, which is with a high base salary and stock options, right? Because now you have everyone on the team, both engineers and salespeople, working towards the common goal of building a better product and serving the customer better instead of meeting your quota. For us, you can't have salespeople that are gonna help you build a good company and a product if they're driven by money, right? Money has to not be what drives you. Quick follow-up question to that.

Are most of the salespeople that you've hired people who've come out of a traditional software sales background, or are they people who've made the transition into sales?

Well, we've only hired a few, but pretty much all of them come from either an engineering or support background. Thanks.

All right, a question from the back of the room.

Guy standing in the back.

Uh, do you guys use any tools, uh, either internally built Are there any cultural tools either internally developed or external that you use to foster your culture?

I have one. We'll do a demonstration. Ooh. Because I wanted to actually use this but it's impolite to use your phone during a conversation— during this kind of thing. But now it's going to be totally appropriate. So, you're not going to be able to see this but this is an iPhone. There's a— there's an app on here that's called Team and it has a little Octocat like on my shirt. This is our mascot guy. So it's called Team and it's blue and it has the thing. So I open it up and it's— it's sort of— so this is an internal tool that we built, right? So this is a website, an iPhone app, and an iPad app. So you open it up and it opens up to status updates. So everyone in the company is encouraged to talk about what they're doing, right? This is sort of what Yammer has— does to an extent, but like Yammer is like, "Holy crap," you know, it's—

it's like everything, you know. It's part of Microsoft, it'll all be fixed. It's the— oh, yeah.

I was going to say it's the Microsoft of internal culture. Well, now it really is. Okay. So, ours is very— ours is very lightweight. So, status updates, right, and people can post pictures. And we have a very big animated GIF culture. So, you see animated GIFs in here a lot. People just talking about what they're doing, right? So, just status. It's like Twitter. It's like an internal Twitter, right? Very basic. But also, we have a number of things. So, one of them is a guide. It's called— it's the Guide to Being a GitHubber. So, this is where You can go in as a new person, you click on it, and here is the— here are the settings. I'll read them. It's Welcome, Management, Communication, Motivation, GitHuber Approach, Organization, the Setup, Campfire. So it's sort of the philosophy. So philosophy section, how to be a GitHuber, tools. This is what people read when they're onboarded to get a sense of what it means to be a GitHuber and what our philosophy is. Oh, and the management section, just so you're not too worried, basically says we don't have managers, okay. So, there's other sections called Ideas. So, all of these things are part of the culture and help propagate it. There's an Ideas section that is about people creating and submitting long-form ideas of how they want to change the product or the company, right? They're essentially pull requests. If you're familiar with GitHub, they're essentially pull requests for the company itself, right? So, it's a list. Anyone in the company can do it and they're discussed. There'll be, you know, tons of comments and Some of them are ignored because they're maybe not good ideas, and some of them end up getting implemented. You can open the front door with the door me button. It's just a big old button, hooks up to an Arduino. Like, all of these things, like, and anyone in the company can come and contribute to this code base. It's internal. It changes rapidly. There's some other stuff in here, but that's specifically a tool that we've built to help propagate the GitHub culture.

That's awesome. Yes, I was gonna say, anyone who wants to can talk to Tom. I understand he's hiring.

Way in the back. I wanna work there. So we've talked a lot about the benefits of culture, but can you take it too far and culture crosses the line into cult?

What happens? Can you take culture and make it all the way into cult? And this is definitely something that happens in the Valley.

It's a really interesting question. What I've found, so we use I use cultural predictors quite a bit in hiring. And what I found is that there's a little bit of a clash because when you want to hire, you want to hire different personality types. For your accountant, you want to hire somebody who's probably very introverted, very detail-oriented, etc. You want to hire somebody in sales, you want probably the opposite profile, right? And so you have different personality types and as you're looking for attitude. It's a different dimension than the personality types and it's easy to confuse them. And what, you know, as you're training, if you do team hiring, which it sounds like a lot of people here do, it's a really hard thing to train people in how to not exclude people because they're a different personality type.

Yeah, I think that you get too dogmatic about culture and you can actually start to really hinder your ability to create a diverse organization. I think that when I— so I get to see everybody that joins Eventbrite before they join Eventbrite. And literally the one thing that I can say that every single person shares is just one thing. And that's that ability to instigate or tolerate fun. If you can't, like if laughing is not, is something that pains you or causes you, you know, to, to be miserable, then you certainly can't come work at Eventbrite 'cause you'll be miserable the whole time. But I think that's, and that, that seems kind of flighty because it is. There's so many different people at Eventbrite, um, that there's this, this sort of diverse landscape. And I think that's a, that's a product of not being too dogmatic about like this culture, you have to be a Brightling.

One important rule to keep in mind, no human sacrifice. That's never really worked out. All right. We have time for just 2 more questions. So we got to make them count. Let's see, who's really enthusiastic about that? Okay. The guy waving his hand over there. This was the— equity or is it— equity. Okay. Got it. Equity and its impact on culture, especially because, you know, I'll expand on that a little further. One of the things that often happens in companies is you have early employees and later employees. Guess what? The early employees have an extra zero on their stock grants compared to later employees. How do you handle that kind of potential conflict? Oh, and you wanna add one more clarification.

And also specifically, how do you provide the incentives to plan to grow profitably, organically, over time?

And also, how do you avoid creating the mercenary mindset? And how do you avoid creating the mercenary mindset? The short-term, "Hey, we're gonna flip it and make a bunch of money and get out." So, from the very beginning, we've done a kind of standard-ish startup-type stock plan.

So, the way that we talk about it is that your stock is coordinated with your risk in the company. So, at first, your risk is very high. You're taking on a lot of risk to join the company. It's an uncertain thing. So, the early people have more. That's to compensate them for enduring that risk. Over time, because our salaries are high, the amount of risk is very low, right? So we've had a sort of standard curve that looks like— kind of like that, right? But every full-time employee in GitHub gets stock options. They're generally incentive stock options, ISOs, which have no value. They really— they're not worth anything when you get them, right? They have a strike price. This is versus an RSU, which a lot of companies use as well. That's useful maybe when you're older. We use ISOs still because we want people to come in and say, "You know what? I wanna make this company more valuable. I wanna take the valuation of the company, whatever it's sort of worth, and increase it. I wanna add something." Right? Because if they don't increase the value of the company, if they don't add something to it, then those stock— the value of that stock won't go anywhere. Right? So that's why we do ISOs. And that's why we incentivize everyone. So, did you create ties to the economy? It took us a while to get that whole thing figured out. But definitely, like, if you're starting a company, figure that stuff out because it will completely screw you if you don't. Very, very important to get that stuff right.

Let me just add something quickly. One of the things that Netflix does apparently is they only— they basically say, "Here's your comp and you have a choice whether you take it in all cash or part equity." and it's all fully vested. So that's their way to try to avoid the mercenary issue. No one's there because they're waiting for their stock to vest. It's all fully vested, which is unique. That is interesting.

All right. One last question from this side of the room. Sorry, guys. Back there. Yes. I would be interested in if you have a lot of remote workers, how do you keep employees from isolating themselves? Ah, excellent question. So especially when you have a lot of remote workers, which I think is absolutely —absolutely the case with GitHub and maybe with some of your other companies. How do you keep them from being isolated? How do you make sure the culture spreads to them? Yeah.

I mean, Tom will have his own answers to GitHub. For Mozilla, we had a couple of things. We had IRC rooms open all the time, all day long. We lived our lives on Twitter a lot, not internal tools, but external tools because of the nature of the company. And then, I more or less said, "Look, anytime anybody needs to get together anywhere in the world, they can do that." And so I said, "Look, I'll squeal if the budget gets too high, if you spend too much money.", but don't worry about it. Just fly. And so we had lots and lots of group get-togethers, lots and lots of all-company get-togethers from everywhere in the world. So it was just the message was you almost can't do it enough. It's all good, whatever you wanna do.

Yeah, we do a lot of things. We do that. We encourage people to travel. People are going to conferences. They're meeting up in various places. Twice a year, we hold a full company summit in San Francisco. We might start doing them abroad at some point. But basically, take the whole company and put it in one place, right, for a week. Drink. So we do that twice a year. That's super important so that people can get to know each other that are remote. Another thing we do is that— and it says this in the guide on the phone— is that our real office is Campfire, and Campfire is a chat client, right? So most of the major important stuff happens there. People are there around the clock. There's enough GitHubbers now that there's always someone in Campfire talking about stuff. We have a ton of rooms. Things like the Beer 30 and making sure that they're recorded and streamed for the remote people, right? Like, if you're gonna have a lot of remote people, they have to feel like they're being catered to. So if you do things that are in the office that are sort of communication, company communication things, and you don't invite them, then they will feel very isolated, right? It's also about just people coordinating and having an asynchronous work style, right? So we don't have office hours, so people work whenever they want regardless of where they live. So, That helps people keep up on what's going on by sort of forcing everyone to work asynchronously, which means get your stuff in writing, put it on GitHub, put it in email, put it on chat. Any of these things you can go back and catch up on them later on. So anyone who's remote can come into the campfire rooms and read the backlog of the stuff that's important to them or see the discussion in the pull request of what's— what kind of code is changing on the website, right? Like we could remove the office right now and it would be irrelevant to the company. Like, it wouldn't matter that much. In fact, there's 125 people in GitHub. On a daily basis in the San Francisco office, there's between 10 and 30. A lot of people work from home. A lot of people are remote. We're about 60% remote employees. So, all of those things combined, but you have to cater to them. Like, you have to think about it. Get them in the off— you know, get them all together every once in a while. Make sure they're included and invited to events. Fly them out. To participate in things. Let them meet up when they need to. All of those things, like just send them care packages, give them all the swag that they want. I mean, all of this stuff, like it's, you know, it's a bunch of it will seem little and frivolous but it all adds up to being a good experience for a remote developer.

All right. Well, I think that we have been incredibly privileged to have this panel with here us— with us here today. Please, a big round of applause for our panelists. I'm sure you guys want to mob them now, so I'll just close. Chad, just if Chad's there, if there's anything else we want to go over, fine. But otherwise, thank you so much for coming, and we look forward to seeing you at an event in the future.