Brie Wolfson (ex Figma, ex Stripe)

Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster. Bri Wolfson currently spends her time writing detailed frameworks like the ones you find on this show at koolaidefactory.com. Before she launched the Kool-Aid Factory, she was a leader on Figma's education team, after spending 4.5 years at Stripe building Stripe Press. Bri, for people who haven't yet heard our last episode, although they should, can you briefly introduce what the work that you do at Kool-Aid Factory and how you work with entrepreneurs?

Yes, I can, Erik. Thank you for having me. So I spend just about all my time researching, writing, and thinking about the way organizations coordinate. And I came to this work because being part of a great organization like Stripe and Figma and Google changed my life. So now I mostly just write about all the great things that we were up to and all the great stuff I've come across and do some hands-on work with founders to implement some of the tactics that I advocate for.

And you work in depth with a handful of companies in a consulting capacity, and then you also write Founder Fodder, which we are loyal subscribers. and beneficiaries of. Talk a little bit about some of the topics that you cover in Founder Fodder.

Yeah, something that I like to say is kind of a cut for the work that I think about is stuff that companies do with the audience of themselves. So of course, there's a ton of machinery around what you're going to do for your users and your partners, and that's, you know, the most critical part of the business in some ways. And then what I like to look at is the stuff more under the hood, the stuff that is more for employees' eyes only. What is your organizational design? What do your company values look like? What is your planning process? How do you bring people together and over what kind of communication tone do you want to have? What are the rules for tools? All this sort of stuff that you have to do maintenance on your own machine and pipes within your own company.

Totally. So we're going to start at a high level and then get more tactical. One of the posts I enjoyed on Founder Fodder is when you talk about big transitions, transitioning from building a product to building a company. That's often when you come in and and help entrepreneurs. When is that point typically for founders when they have to start really thinking about?

Yeah, first I have to say that I love hearing people say founder fodder out loud. It's a real mouthful, huh?

Yeah, it can be.

Yeah, I think this transition comes at a different point for everyone. It's funny, when I got started on this work, I had a hypothesis that it was going to be around the exact same time for every company that my work would start to become relevant. But it's actually different for every company, and I think it's more about when osmosis stops working. And telltale signs that this is happening is folks are in conference rooms talking about something and it makes the founder nervous. They don't know what they might be talking about. Work is getting duplicated. Folks don't know what other people are working on. These kinds of things that make the company feel really large. And in some ways, this has been accelerated by the move to more async or shift to more remote I think in a lot of ways, the company's center of gravity has to be even stronger to support this new working environment.

Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned 4 examples. I want to go through them and then we'll go through more tactical examples. One of them is when information moves through osmosis to the right places, as you were saying, it happens kind of organically, to when you now have to prescribe systems for information flows. Can you give some examples of what this looks like and examples of it done well?

Yeah, I was actually re-listening to an old Boss Talk from a16z this morning. Erik, you turned me on to that during the Clubhouse days of pandemic.

Yes.

And I think it was Ben was saying that oftentimes politics is the thing that takes the place of org design. If people don't know what the right mechanisms are to make decisions, to get work done, to push stuff forward, they have to rely on these sort of more shenanigan-like jockeying or influencing with personality instead of just with systems. So I think these are things like setting up decision-making forums, having a review of work before it goes out so that things can be approved. And this just greases the wheels for the whiplash and also makes sure that everyone could just do the work right. I think something that's obvious, but I'll just say it, everybody wants to do the right work. And I know there's a great fear of kind of micromanagement, but just saying what is required to do a great job is just like a great way to get great work done. A lot of times it's just about setting up the templates, making the expectations clear, writing the PRD, writing the plan, these sorts of mechanisms that just really help the org stay on the rails.

Yeah, that's helpful. Another one of the transitions you mentioned is going from trusting your intuition about how things are going to leaning on systems and processes to keep tabs on how things are going. What are the key systems and processes to get right, or what do people make mistakes on in this area?

Yeah, you know, this is my very favorite topic. And the word I like to use for this is forums, like where do people come to with their work? So I think a great example of this might just be a launch review or something. I can't tell you how many times the thing just goes out and then there's this retroactive scramble to make sure everything on the checklist was hit. But just like, why not do that before and all get in the room to figure it out? An all-hands, I think, is another great example of this kind of thing. And everybody does an all-hands, I think it's just one of these mechanisms that have just stuck.

Yeah.

But doing it right is just extremely, extraordinarily high impact. Spotlighting what work is great so that others can model the behavior after the stuff that the leaders bring on the company stage. Making sure the stuff that's truly important is making its way into a place where it's distributed in front of everyone. So these kinds of things that just set up a rhythm that everyone can rely on to just get their stuff done.

How about from the transition from when team members grab their own work ad hoc to getting crisp and prescriptive about who does what, when? What's really important to get right then?

Yeah, I think this is in some ways the hardest one. And one of the reasons I think is just sort of the mythology and the lore around what a startup is, which is just this scrappy environment where it's like you bring yourself to the work and your skills and talents are the things that matter the most to the company. You have a deep knowledge of what the company is up to and its goals such that you can make your own local decisions that will directly influence the global trajectory of the company. And then all of a sudden, the company is kind of too large to do that. And people are, I think I mentioned in the beginning, there's stuff overlapping, people are working on the same stuff, or you row it in slightly the wrong direction, that means there's a bunch of drag created. You forget there's a dependency on this other team, so you get work 80% of the way done, but it can't quite get over the finish line 'cause your work isn't staffed. These kinds of mechanisms that sort of just require a little bit of coordination overhead. And I think people think of process as a really dirty word, or it seems like it's going to suck to engage in a planning process. But the stuff that actually really got me to fall in love was standing up Stripe's inaugural planning process and just starting to internalize the ways in which companies can just get in their own way, or people can get in their own way, by just failing to do this little bit of coordination required to just grease the wheels to sprint dead on.

And what was so impressive about that planning process? Or when you're advising other companies on how to set up their planning process, what's something that they need to make sure they get right or something that seems non-obvious about how to do that well?

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this lately, especially, yeah, I've taken on a couple of engagements around the topic. And I think the first thing to note that's pretty interesting is there is really no one-size-fits-all planning process. I think I expected a little bit, like a part of what I do is try to generate playbooks that any company can rely on. And this is one of those that you've really got to do it your way. This is answering questions like, what is the right time horizon for your plan? What is the artifact? What altitude are you writing your plans at? Are these at the company level or the business unit level? But in all cases, I will say the 2 universal truths is that company-wide priorities just matter. That has to be well articulated. Oftentimes, it's best if this comes in the form of centralized metrics. And then the second one is that dependencies just kill productivity. The more people that have to get into the kitchen to do the work, and the more coordination overhead required, just the less productive organizations are. And this is some to do with organizational design, but I think we all know the Amazon 2-pizza rule. It's just making sure that things are sufficiently disentangled such that work can make progress without relying on too, too many people.

Totally. The last one I want to cover here is the transition from individuals are the building blocks of the company to teams are the building blocks of the company. Talk more about what this means and what you have to get right during that transition.

Yeah, I'm smirking a little bit now because a common thing that founders will call me is they're just completely overloaded by their calendar and most of their day is spent in one-on-ones. And the main that those one-on-ones is doing is just providing status updates to what's going on. And then in those status updates, some conflicting reports will come out, and then it launches this other set of required fact-finding to figure out what is actually just going on. And this is not what leaders want to be spending their time on, nor is it highest impact, is just kind of fact-finding about what is truly going on today. And part of this is that when companies start, individuals kind of are that unit. There's one engineer, there's one business person, there's one support person. But over time, many people are touching the same stuff, and this is when some of the games of telephone begin, and it makes it hard just to get a record straight. So one of the things I like to advocate for a lot is starting to build the team units into their own discrete functions and then reporting out as these groupings. But it's a challenging transition because it also means that people are spending less one-on-one time with the leaders that they often join these companies for. So this is another tricky one, but it's just so important to get the team stuff right. Yeah.

We go much deeper in the previous episode on company values, but the idea of you go from company values and norms are upheld organically to they have to be articulated. Talk about that transition. I know you've created them for On Deck. Obviously, we're super grateful. Then also companies like Replit and Notion and others. Talk about why that's so important or what people miss about that.

Yeah, I'll steal this line from Patrick from his interview with Elad in The High Growth Handbook where he says a lot of companies end up articulating their values too late. And in the early days of company building, I think it's super important that this stuff is generally felt. It's sort of an intuitive sense of togetherness. And we all know that sometimes putting words to something actually confuses it or isn't sufficiently nuanced in order to capture the experience. But then when some of these, or some of this stuff starts happening where the culture seems to be kind of tearing at the threads, or you're not sure how to behave, starting to put pen to paper on what these values are matters a lot. And I think I've heard it also said that culture starts when the doors close. And there has to be a confidence that no matter what corner of the org you're in, no matter what power lines are being crossed, or who's in the room, that everyone's making decisions in the best interest of the company overall. And starting to put pen to paper on the values helps just break ties, make decisions, remind each other of what way you're moving. I think we all know the famous one of move fast and break things and how appropriate and helpful that was in Facebook's early days. They actually updated it much later in the company's life to, I think, move fast with stable infrastructure or something. But you can imagine that these things evolve as the needs of the company and the product evolve too. But having a clear stance on exactly what direction everyone should be moving in, no matter what you're up to, is just one of these connective tissues that can really make a difference.

Totally. When you work with CEOs and when you worked with us, you work on a variety of different company-building areas of the business because lots of fires come up and lots of not only solutions need to be implemented, but also systems, precedents, templates so that they don't come up again. Go into some experiences that you've had, whether at Stripe or Figma or through your work at Kool-Aid Factory, and then use them to elicit broader principles on how you think about various different elements of company building. The first one I want to go to is the bar raiser system at Stripe and what that means for hiring. Why don't you talk a bit about that?

Yeah. The bar raiser is a mechanism. I don't know if Amazon originated it, but it's certainly their phrase. Where there's a group of employees at the company and their role is to make sure that every subsequent hire at the company is going to raise the overall bar for the company. So this means that every new hire is better than the average employee, I guess is a way to say it. And something neat about having folks on this committee, if you will, is that they are a trump card in an interview process. So if they block, the hiring manager cannot override. And 2, in many ways, they don't have a—

Interesting.

as close of a stake in the outcome of this team's role. They're not motivated by things like, oh, we're totally underwater on this project, or we really need to backfill this head that just dropped out. They're mostly responsible to the org's overall health. So having this kind of outsider in the interview loop is helpful. So this was Amazon's design. And then we added one principle when we were implementing bar raisers at Stripe, and we called this Elevate. Which was also to give candidates an opportunity to talk to folks from around the org. Amazon operates with business units. Stripe is incredibly cross-functional. So we actually felt like it would add a lot to the interview experience for the candidate to just be able to meet more people from around the organization and round out their understanding of just how the org works. And they didn't get this narrow look of just how one organization operates. I will say, I don't know if this is still in place today. But this was the design when we first got it going.

And what happens when the bar raiser is like, no, this person just doesn't meet, but the person who's closer to what's needed is like, hey, do you really know? Can you even evaluate this person? Or how do you think about that?

Yeah, 2 things I'll say about this. The first is that everyone immediately imagines the most dramatic moment where the hiring manager is like, we must hire, and the bar raiser is like, we mustn't hire. And everybody at these companies, oftentimes you're working with a group of shareholders of the company, everyone's got the company's success in mind. So they're really not these kind of dramatic blowups. Oftentimes it's more about teasing out nuance. I would say in my couple of years on Elevate, maybe had to defect from the hiring manager's recommendation maybe once or twice. And even still, these examples are not even memorable enough So probably no one put up much of a fight. But I actually think it's a lot about just the spirit of having this person in the room that can make a huge difference. That's the first. And the second thing to say is that the interview design actually matters a lot. So part of standing up this program was coming up with what are the core values that every single person who joins Stripe should embody? One of these, for example, it was good communication, another structured thinking, and then just having interview questions designed to get at this exact thing. So everybody at the company, in theory, has already agreed upon these values or virtues for the org. So pushing back that someone wasn't a clear communicator or a structured thinker, this should be a red flag to anyone who's working at the company anyway, and it would probably prevent them from being able to do a great job. Now, I think you can push on whether this model of interviewing is effective in assessing these things, but in terms of having the company on board, There wasn't much tension there.

Yeah, that's helpful. I want to switch to company culture. It's something obviously you spend a lot of time in your work working with companies. At Kool-Aid, there's one specific example of what some of you did at Stripe called the Convergence Fun Committee. Why don't you talk about that example and then we'll take some broader trends?

Yeah, I'm laughing. Stripe has a lot of great things about the culture and fun was one that we had to work a little harder at than some of the others. So Convergence is the annual all-employee get-together. And I think these moments actually matter even more now in these remote environments, even if they're just kind of virtual experiences. But part of what I worked on was just like making the experience kind of feel like us. I think there's an experience like when you're watching your own colleagues like on some kind of stage with like a Britney mic and on the Jumbotron and There's some kind of, yeah, you can kind of feel a little bit distant from yourself or the culture that you've been a part of. This is kind of like unrecognizable machinery to you in some ways. You become a user or consumer of your own culture. So part of this was coming up with what experiences at the company event would make it feel like ours. So this was things like making some user videos, interviewing employees, having silly artifacts around just to kind of drop into ourselves and make sure that, yeah, it felt like ours and only ours. And I think in terms of these, like the real lore and mythology of the company, a good sniff test is, could anybody reasonably have this too and it would feel like theirs? And finding the things that are just on the edge of that, I think you could watch it with no mention of Stripe and it would be like, that's for Stripe. That's the kind of stuff that you want to do that will feel really yours.

One of the things I think you've also been deliberate about is how to keep track of the lore over time. How do you recommend companies do that or how have you seen companies do that well?

I'm really glad you asked about this. I've been thinking a lot about this lately and maybe I'm going to build a little product around it, hopefully at some point. But the idea is actually to just find a way to capture this that's a co-created mechanism. No one person really writes the company's And if they do, they're going to miss some parts. So it's about how do we engage the whole company in defining and documenting the lore and mythology? One just really obvious tactic there is, is just have either a Slack channel or an open Figma file where people can just dump stuff in it whenever they want. And this should be a joy to scroll through when you go backwards. The kind of point of it is, well, we want to look back and see this and be like, wow, we've come so far. And I've been thinking about nostalgia just in general, like what its role is in the organization. And ultimately, it's important for all organizations to be very forward-looking. But this little bit of jolt of nostalgia, like for whether you were there to participate in creating those memories or not, it kind of just helps you see your place in history of the company. I was just talking to a friend who recently left her company after quite a stint there, and her team kind of pulled a list of stats the day she joined. and they pulled the delta from when she was leaving. And when you do it every day, it's kind of looking in the mirror. It's hard to tell the differences day after day, but on some scope or with some distance, you're like, wow, we've come so far. Or the top user when I first joined is now like 253. We've grown so much. So these kinds of things that remind you like, wow, there's really been progress here.

Yeah, no, that's well said. I'm curious how you work with When CEOs come to you and say, hey, I want to have a culture change. We mentioned Facebook earlier, the canonical example, moving from move fast and break things to move fast and build infra or whatever the phrase was. There are times where the founders are going to want to change the culture for whatever reason. How have you seen that done well?

This is actually one of the reasons I advocate for having operating principles documented in the first place. One of the best ways to say, hey, there's a breaking change happening at our company, is to say, we are updating the values. One kind of non-judgy version of this is frugality. It would make a lot of sense for a pre-seed or bootstrap company to really embrace this. And maybe once they get their first round of funding, that would actually hold them back to be frugal. And it might make sense to spend money on some stuff to pour gas on the fire. So these kind of announcing a breaking change, I think, is the first place. And updating your values is a good place to start. And I think just being explicit about what norms are changing is extremely important. And this is important, one, to be able to articulate what the change is and why and explain that to your people. And 2, give your people an opportunity to select out of the new version of the company. And in many ways, a philosophical difference is an amazing way to leave, and it's a really hard way to stay. If a core value is frugality or something, and you're going to be asked to pull out the money gun and that's going to make you uncomfortable, you should probably find a new home. And kind of starting to get explicit about what these norms are and help employees understand what their own boundaries and limits in relationship to the company's culture is, is just a really healthy way to grow. Does that answer your question? It's a little bit fuzzy, I think.

No, no, it does. And it inspires a new question, which is, what have you seen companies who have really passionate or great alumni, besides giving them a great experience while they're there, After they're there, what is the proper or best way to build sort of a community that is rooting for the company? All the great things about a great alumni.

Erik, you're always reading my mind. I was actually just writing about this a little bit this morning. So I think the first thing to do is just have a place for people to go once they leave. For Stripe, this is a Slack channel. I've been kind of itching to see when Figma's is going to pop up. What's clear is that there's an obvious— people will stay in touch with their colleagues no matter what, but it's piecemeal. But having a collective place where everyone just knows to go is helpful. There's actually been a big discussion in the xDrive channel about whether we want the channel to ask the company to put it in the offboarding docs to just show that there's a home to come to for a safe landing. So I think this is the most important thing, just having a clear place where people can go to just be an alum. And I think a question that's come up a bunch is like, should this be resources or the company give money? And I don't think this is necessary. The things that's really going to be the glue is just shared experience, shared values, and just having a place where people are reliably connecting is often the most helpful. One thing that surprised me is just how much the norms at the company have extended into this, the style of this alumni group. It has the same exact flavor and flair as we had within the company. And I think that's a great sign of strong culture and also that the people who were at the company personally identified with it and still exude these values even when they're not with the company. But just a place to go, I think, is good enough. Yeah.

I want to segue to something you did when you were working the education team at Figma. It was new market activation. Talk a little bit about what you did there and what broader principle we can learn from that.

Yeah, this was super exciting. So I joined Figma to do their first vertical market experiment, which is just like, can we identify a persona that we'd be excited to have more of on the platform and see if we can go find them? And Figma, a great tool for designing and collaborative design, we identified that classrooms would be an amazing place to start.

Mm-hmm.

So my main user here was going to be students and teachers. And I think I underestimated when I joined the definition of students and teacher. For me, when I imagine myself as a student, it's very much in a classroom with walls at a desk with a teacher in front of the room. And when I got to the company, firstly, I was realizing how many people were students of design and learning design online, and that the physical walls was maybe not the best way to define a classroom today. And the second thing is that shortly after I started, we were transitioning into the COVID world and a huge question popped up is just like, what were campuses going to do? Since Figma is a tool in the browser, this was like a huge boon to the company in some ways. So it was figuring out how are we going to capture this like back-to-school energy, but like in a virtual place. And I would say like of all the things I'm proud of, probably the thing that I'm most proud of is the virtual campus community. And this was just a Slack channel where we said, hey, if you are learning design, come. And I couldn't believe how many people wanted to play in this space together. We saw student groups from Berkeley and UCLA and actually all over the world, people who had side hustles or student groups to teach each other design or learn were coming and sharing learnings with each other. Folks had built all this curricula to learn design in their own spaces, and then they brought it together to Yeah, teach each other. And this was just, again, a huge boon to the company. Figma's all about community and seeing it emerge in this virtual space without even having to touch much of it was really, really cool.

That is really interesting. What do you think is the applicable strategy that other people could take for their own market activation?

Yeah, I think when I first started up the community, it was clear that we wanted to have a space where students could come. I think the businessy thinking around this was like, oh, we should have a clear space for distribution into our student population. How could we have them on our own channels instead of going to find them where they are? So we just had to hold this big magnet up. And then the thing I kind of quickly learned from just watching these students interact, it was also a great way to study my user base, was that I just wasn't going to be able to produce the stuff that was cool or interesting. I remember when people first started flooding in, there was just a ton of dog memes. And I'm not a huge dog person. I was like, wow, what am I going to be able to contribute as kind of like the owner of this community? And then I was like, wait, there's really no owner in a community in this capacity. And it was about kind of like passing the torch on to folks who are already members of the community who wanted to like take on more active roles to do stuff. So it was very much about like putting the opportunities in the hands of members of the community instead of trying to prescribe too much. And I think this is, depending on what your user base is, this can be a kind of scary moment. But I think luckily we set it up in such a way that it was just a really generative, positive space. They organized their own hackathons. I mean, these are things that companies spend an extraordinary amount of resources on. And it was pretty amazing to watch these 18 to 20-year-olds self-organize this without a dime really from the company.

Totally.

Yeah.

I want to segue to brand marketing that works. And one of your examples here was the Figma About Us page. So what can we learn from that?

Yeah, I was trying to kind of tie a thread in this before we got on. And I'll start with something that I encounter a lot, which is that— and I'll come back to the Figma stuff, but people often ask me, how can we have Stripe Press at our company? And my answer is always like, well, should you have Stripe Press at your company? And I think it's really a match of what story do you want to tell about your own company and what artifact makes sense for that story that you want to tell. For Figma, having a really kind of cutesy, interactive, colorful, beautiful kind of, I don't know, work-in-progress-y feel made a lot of sense. We wanted a place to go that explained the story, not through stuff that we said, but through stuff that our community members said. So if you went to the page now, you would see a lot of quotes, a lot of screenshots, a lot of Twitter, including from some of the early haters, a lot of the early tinkering that was done. Figma is a spectacularly designed, meticulous product, and I think it's pretty bold for a company's about page to just literally show the oldest version of it. But Figma's all about work in progress and showing your work, and the early pushback was around no designer would ever want to show work in progress. So being bold enough to show that ourselves on a page to make it shine, was really important to us. But I think it's about kind of like nailing the story of you, having the confidence to express that in your way, and then putting some actual look and feel oomph behind it. I'm kind of, I don't know, I'm disappointed at the state of about pages in some way where I just, yeah, I see this playbook where it's like a few investor logos and a few quotes from top users and it's all the same users all the time and then a few values that are a little generic. And I just want to see these places with more pizzazz, more personality. And I think that's the stuff that really great brand marketing does, and it helps people tell the story of the company without you having to say it in those words.

Yeah, that's really interesting. When people come to you and say, hey, we want to do our own version of Stripe Press, what are they really asking? Or what should they be asking?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think they're reacting to the fact that there's a beautifully produced artifact out there. That's one. And the second thing I think they're reacting to is that many, many, many people who are leading and operating from within companies have their own intellectual ambitions and curiosities. And what an amazing outlet, a book. And I can see why that's appealing. to get into the book business. But this will be no surprise to anyone here, the book business is a terrible business. But when you think about someone holding a book or putting it on their desk as a little billboard, the conversation changes a little bit. But yeah, I think they're asking, what artifact can we have that would just blow people away?

Yeah. And so your advice to them is find ways that are native to your your company or your product that are way less capital intensive for you to express similar sort of interestingness or outlet for people?

Yeah, I think so. And I don't know if capital intensive is the right thread to pull in terms of the investment. A billboard is quite expensive, maybe the same as a print run for a book, but it's more about the thinking time. And I think I've maybe told this joke or story before, but I thought I came up with the idea for a Stripe Press, and it turns out it was in John and Patrick's head for a long, long time before that. And I think in many ways, companies should sort of earn the right to do these kinds of projects, earn the right in terms of having a brand presence that isn't about this other weird thing first, and people having an understanding of the brand such that the thing that emerges feels really authentic. and organic and not just this square peg, round hole or some kind of weird stunt. Maybe Red Bull is another example of great brand marketing, getting people to jump out of planes and stuff. It's totally bizarre. It's extremely expensive, but for some reason watching an astronaut with a Red Bull can jump out of a spaceship just makes total sense for the brand. And I think that's what you want. And it takes a while to build up this visceral understanding of what a brand stands for. And I will say, in many ways, if you can't think about, if you can't even conceive of what that flavor of thing might be, maybe the brand is not quite specific enough to sustain something like this yet.

Yeah. Let's talk about editorial strategy and how to do that well. One of the examples you brought up was the Stripe Atlas Guides. Talk about that.

Yeah. Stripe Atlas Guides had 2 goals, and actually one dovetailed into the Stripe Press goal. The first goal was just Stripe is all about helping businesses succeed, and the better businesses do on Stripe, the better Stripe does. So we shared in these goals. So providing playbooks for companies to do their work better was an obvious next step for the company. And something that was interesting about the project is Stripe hadn't really sustained outside writers writing on our own platform before. So this was in some ways, some of the biggest challenge of the project was to figure out what is the version of Stripe's voice that is someone else's voice coming through? How do we make room for that? And in many ways, this was the precursor for an increment or for Stripe Press, was just starting to hone what does an outsider's voice within the Stripe universe look and feel like, which dovetails into the second purpose of the project, was just to start to bring the people in our orbits closer. So if we look at the authors of the early Atlas guides, these were folks that were kind of around the company, orbiting around, that we were close to, taking advice from, chatting with, our users were in love with, had spent time with, that we wanted to just bring a little closer. So having a place where the folks who might not be top users but felt spiritually aligned or connected to the company, that they had an outlet to work with us in a real way, this was something important to the company as well and good practice.

The companies that you work with, when they're thinking about editorial strategy, is it largely They're trying to go beyond the founders in terms of being the voice. They're trying to develop a comprehensive brand voice for the company.

Yeah, I think that's— yeah, maybe this is the difference between an editorial strategy and a product writing strategy. This is not launching products or writing marketing stuff. This is about what does this company think about in a broader idea space? It's not tied to an outcome, to a product. It's more tied to the ideas. So yeah. And I hear a lot of people starting with the idea that they want to have an editorial strategy. They want to have writing on the internet. They want to have a book. They want to have a magazine. And then my next question is like, well, what do you want to put in it? I think you can say the same thing about marketing maybe too. You want to have a billboard, but what do you want it to say? And I think this is actually the hardest existential question yet. What do we want to say? And as you said, a lot of times we think about this kind of springing forth from the founder's head, like, what does our org think about? What is its personality? Maybe a shortcut is actually just to go to the deepest practitioner in your org and, like, what do they know that, because they've been working in this random weird corner of this product space or idea space or something, what do they know that's so weird that nobody else could possibly know because nobody spends as much time as they do in this thing? And if you were to go look on Stripe's blog, and I still think it's one of the best company blogs on the internet, it's always the practitioners that are writing it. This is not the product marketer, this is not the head of editorial, this is the practitioner. And they sound like the practitioner and they use the words of a practitioner. And I think this is a great place to start for an editorial strategy.

Yeah, it's interesting. I've seen a couple of examples that come to mind are like, I feel like Notion was doing a series on the history of technology or the history of computing.

Yeah, we love tools and crafts.

Yeah, totally. Stripe's got their own interest in history of technology and placing themselves within it. Then other people are really interested in the future and they have this very futuristic aesthetic or content stream and placing themselves being a part of it.

We talked about what goes into the company scrapbook. I think another thing that is a real marker of a company's culture is who and what are they inspired by. My favorite thing when I get into a company Slack is to go look at the inspiration channel. It's so telling and it's so different org to org. And this is another great place to start thinking about what does your editorial strategy look like, is just what are you inspired by, what kinds of things do you think about. So it's cool to see how this births out of just like what is the idea space that you marinate in. And again, like how does this combine with like your particular knowledge about the world from working in your space? That's the That's the spark.

Yeah, totally. Let's talk about M&A acquisitions and particularly how to integrate acquired teams. You worked on that at Stripe. Why don't you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, this is one of my favorite projects that I've ever worked in. Shout out to Courtland and the IndieHackers crew because this was a dream project bringing them into Stripe. But the philosophy behind this work was, hey, there's a ton of people working on the product and the financial integrations, What about the culture though? How are these people going to operate in their new working environment, especially because it's often smaller teams that are coming in? How does the bigger org not swallow them? How do they get to bring their traditions and their personality with them into this new org? And yeah, many acquisitions fail because there's org rejection on one or both sides. So this was about trying to grease the wheels to just not have that, to have a really intentional bringing together of 2 cultures. There's a story I really like here, which is, I guess, when Google acquired YouTube. I should fact-check this because I use it a lot, but I think my source is good, that Google sent the plant person to the YouTube office to get the plants going. And the kind of meme is just like, don't not be the plant harmonizer. There's a way for these kind of 2 cultures to to coexist and sort of grow together over time, but it's not about importing one culture to the other.

I like that. That makes a lot of sense. Going back to brand marketing that works, talk about the Config keynote speeches at Figma.

Yeah, so this was another total blast of a project, which is when Figma knew that we were going to bring our users together for the first conference, it was just like, who would we want on the main stage? And I think this has become another kind of thread of my work is just kind of evaluating who is in the orbit, who is in the idea space of the company, what kind of orthogonal perspective or what kind of new ideas can we bring onto the company stage that again is not about the products necessarily, just about the general idea space that we're marinating in. So the first question is like, who should we invite to come talk? And the second piece is what should they say? So this was really fun. Again, it was just an exercise of what stories do we want to tell, what do we want to stand for? Would they show up to this conference that had never existed before for this tiny product with a bunch of passionate users? And we had just an amazing first go. Craig Ma came and he talked about walking, and Devin came and talked about cities, and Mei Li came and talked about building. I mean, just a truly incredible lineup of folks. And again, I'm excited that companies want to spend more time bringing people on not only as users, but what are other ways that there's mutual value created for people in the orbit of a company? Not just putting your credit card down to use the product, but actually just to share ideas and wisdom and some spiritual alignment. And I think companies that invest in this are often the ones I'm most attracted to because it shows me that there's a core belief system there and a lack of navel-gazing or curiosity about the broader world and a desire to bring folks in the orbit and the community closer. And a stage at a company conference is a great way to start playing with those spaces.

Yeah, that's a great example. So we've touched on a number of elements of company building. You're clearly building this repository of company building techniques and principles while also working with individual companies to get the experiences beyond Stripe and Figma and your other experiences. What's still unsolved for you? What challenges are you still trying to figure out? And give us a little bit of a window into what's next for Kool-Aid and what can people expect to see?

Yes. Yeah, I'm glad you asked this question because I'm going to turn it into an ask for listeners. But I'll say that the Kool-Aid project started mostly because I had this extremely formative and great experience at Stripe, and then I had another one of them at Figma, and the cultures were completely different. And it set into motion this set of ideas to me that there's so many ways that this thing can work. And I got so curious about what are all the mechanisms that just are working for all these companies. And this is not a monolith. The same thing that works for one company would not work for another. So I really think of myself as sort of an anthropologist or an ethnographer or something where all I want to do is just collect stories from great institutions. And specifically around what are the virtues that these orgs live and breathe by, and then what are the mechanisms that they move these virtues through. So I'll turn this into an ask for folks in the community. Please, please, please share your stories of what it's like building and growing at your company. What values do you embrace in your work? How does that play out in your behaviors and actions and decisions? I just want to know it all. If there's anything I should read or watch, Or anyone that I should talk to to pull these stories out and to help spread them to others who are maybe taking inspiration or ideas, I would just love to hear them.

That's an awesome call to arms. I'll close also by recommending people subscribe to Founder Fodder. And also, if you're building a company that is turning from a product into a company and have to start thinking about some of these transitions that we've been discussing, you'd be lucky to to be a customer of Kool-Aid. We at Omdex certainly are, and other great scaling companies have been as well. So Bree, thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom again with us, and excited for the next chat.

Erik, thank you for giving people the space to talk about this stuff. It's so fun and so important, and thank you. Cool.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company, uplevel your career, or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time.