5 Company Culture Tips That You Need To Know About!

Okay, 60 minute video. Here it comes. I'll put my timer on so that I don't cheat. Stopwatch start. 60 minutes. Lessons from Josh about company culture. This is something that I have, well, constantly been learning about over the last three years of my life while starting data Nerds. So I'm going to talk about five different things today, and I can definitely tell you now that I am probably a little bit of an outlier. I'm super lucky. I've had some amazing luck with hiring people. I've also made some massive, massive mistakes that I can tell you about. And hopefully you won't have to go down the same path that I did. But the five things that I'm going to talk about today are the first one's going to be, I learned a formula while I was at techstars, or just kind of like a model or a mindset or a perspective you can take when you're starting out a company and you have a co founder and how you should look at the two of you. I look at this as actually my first employee as well. And it's kind of like a chaos and rigidity model that I think can be really valuable when you're thinking about starting a company and who you're going to bring to your team. That's going to be the first thing that I'm going to talk about. The second thing I'm going to talk about is your first hires and kind of some of the ways that I'm really only going to speak from experience for about 60 minutes. I think that that's the best way to teach things is I can tell you my opinion on some stuff, but I don't actually know if that's accurate or not. So I can tell you from the experiences that I've had. So I'm going to talk about the first few hires we had at the company, going from one to three people to about 10 to 20. We got up to about 25 today. We probably have, I think, 13 or 14 full time. We have four or five students that still come in periodically a few times a week. And then we have, I'll say anywhere from five to 10 different contractors all over the world working on different projects at any given time. So what's the other thing I'm gonna talk about? Oh, team gatherings. So like, we have weekly planning, we have monthly planning, quarterly planning, annual planning. We have an end of the week meeting and then team gatherings, team events, kind of ways you can structure that and like really kind of build a family. The fourth thing Office fun. I'll take you for a quick walk around this place. And we're in my office right now. We're new here. You're going to notice when I walk you around that like half the stuff is still on the ground, but whatever. And then the fifth thing, retrotude, it's a special name that we made up. I gotta thank Jordan for that. It's kind of our combination of what we do retrospective at the end of every week and gratitude mashed all together and super critical part of our week. I think it took about two or three months for the team to actually get comfortable with it, but game changer in the long run. So the first thing I'm going to talk about, three minutes in already. I'm doing a great job. The first thing I'm going to talk about chaos and rigidity and just want to make sure that you guys can see the whiteboard. Yeah, I should probably turn the music off in the background too. I love this song though. I hope it doesn't ruin anything. Whatever. Okay, so I don't recommend starting a company by yourself anymore. I saw at techstars almost every other company was a there were two co founders or three co founders. And being a founder is the loneliest job in the world. Especially if it's. If you're doing it by yourself, you know, the roller coaster is real. There's lots of ebbs and flows in this and there's a lot of highs and there's a lot of lows. And when you're a single co founder, you can't be a single co founder. That's not possible. When you're a single founder, you know, there are certain times where I'm unable to go and share my biggest fears, my biggest concerns, my biggest issues. The largest fire that's in the room that no one else can see because it's really on me. And if I scare them, I'm taking them. I'm taking their mind off what they're supposed to be focused on. And you know, as CEO, to make it the most basic level, my job is to keep the lights on and keep everyone here motivated and know that today we're working on this. But the vision's here and we're going to this island. We're going together and we're going to enjoy the. The journey. This is going to be success right here. Actually, fuck it. I don't even want to say I'm going to go for success because for me, success is just constantly learning. I love making mistakes. I share that so often I am wrong. Many, many times a day. But I'm willing to accept that, and I'm going to look it up. And I love to be proven wrong. So if you know anything about me. I've traveled a ton in the last year and a half. Lots of conferences, lots of events, lots of just meeting one on one with many brilliant, brilliant people. And it's my favorite thing being the dumbest person in the room. I come to this office every single day, and I'm probably the dumbest person in the room or on the floor, at least. It's my favorite thing in the entire world. So as a founder, I think that I can kind of speak from that. But I'm going to talk about the chaos and rigidity here. We're five minutes in. So I've never done this before. Hope it's not backwards, but. So I'm gonna call this. Rigidity and this chaos. So you're starting a new company. It's you and your best friend. It's you and a new partner that you have. I just want to come and double check on this again. Oh, yeah, y' all can see that, right? Zoom in a bit maybe? Eh, whatever. So typically, people think that when you have two founders, you guys want to meet right in the middle here, right? Like, this would be. You know, let's imagine that this is the ideal scenario that you two live in. You. You live right in here. Maybe one of you teeters a little bit in here, but if the two of you meet in here, it's actually really detrimental. And these are personality types, goals, ambitions. There's many different factors that go into this. I'd say a skill set is also a part of that. But from experience, I'll just tell you about Evan and myself and how it works with us. I'm crazy, as many of you will know. And I live right like this is Josh. If every single day, if I'm on the inside of the line, I'm doing a great job. But you actually kind of want someone that's going to live right in here. The reason for this is because I can take the biggest task most monumental, like monstrous, gigantic. I want it. I don't even know if it's possible, but I'm like, hmm, that doesn't exist. I know that we can do that. It's a moonshot or, you know, kind of what many of us heard Naveen Jain talk about at Thrive the other weekend and taking those moonshots. But imagining something that's not built or that's not that many won't think is possible going there, you know, kind of modeling it out, building some scenarios and seeing, thinking about them, working through them and seeing what the possibilities are. When some of these are crazy. A lot of people will call it shiny object syndrome. I love that. I think it's also that that word should be replaced with creativity or creative thinking. Don't get me wrong, a lot of it will be stupid ideas, but you can get away with it. So I live over there and I come up with all this crazy, insane ideas that maybe 1 in 10 are actually possible. And then I have Evan. I wish I had another color penny over here. So I wake up in the morning, I come to the office. I should have different colors for this. And Evan lives right here. And this is kind of like where are like the perfect even looks right. So I want to get rid of the thinking of this. I don't want you to have the same kind of goals and methods as your co founder, who you're going to be working with in the beginning. I actually want one of you to be crazy. Building the vision of the company, having this grand vision, and then having a technical person that can kind of sit there and be like, okay, you know, 10% of this is real and I can get it done in six months. Give me three engineers, two marketers, and et cetera, et cetera. That's a great relationship that the two of you can have. And I'm just speaking from my own experience. So think about when you're evaluating who you're going to be working with first, especially if they're a co founder, which I highly recommend. If you're in technology, if you're in real estate investing for financial purposes, I'm not sure if this model works. But for tech, I think that you should really be evaluating if there's three people. I don't know where the third person fits in here. Maybe there's another category someone can tell me about, but I really do want you to think about this, is you need someone who's a little bit crazy and is going to think, you know, kind of outside the box and work on things. And then you need to have someone who can put all that in the box and, and make it functional and usable for the millions of people that hopefully you'll satisfy with whatever product you end up building. But that's the first thing that I wanted to talk about in this, is that I think that that model's really, really key to understand that you need to have someone that can get shit done I can get shit done in the chaos phase, but I really do thrive in being uncomfortable and being able to not being uncomfortable, but, you know, problem solving. Like when a fire comes out, I'm the first person behind, like, pulling the hose out and I'm ready to go. Like, I'm putting that fire out. I don't give a shit what it takes. What else I was working on, which can become detrimental. With Evan, that's not his role. I want to be the one that goes and puts the fire out. I don't even want Evan to know about it unless he absolutely has to. So he's the one getting all the work done while I'm out there. Just like either selling things, making a bigger vision, making sure our team is motivated, et cetera, et cetera. So that was number one. The second thing that we were going to talk about is first hires. So I'm going to talk about four or five people. Sorry, there's a good song on in the background. Okay. My first hire, John Couch. Jonathan Couch. I've honestly watched this guy change so much. It's so crazy. We've seen him, you know, settle down with his girlfriend, have a kid, you know, just an amazing human. And he was our. So after Evan joined. So I begged Evan for a long time to come to the company. And eventually, after six or seven months. This is a repetitive story as well. If you want someone to work for you, be relentless and fierce. Do not take no for an answer. Lisa Nottebrock would be another great one for that. In two years she worked at Shell. I have a little startup with a few people doing a couple things, and I'm like, hey, quit your big corporate job and come and bring corporate to my company. Which will be so much fun. Which is not. We didn't even have a vacation policy. We didn't have, oh my God, time tracking. None of this stuff. We didn't have sick days, none of it. She's done all of that in a matter of months and there's a bright future ahead for her. But John, I'm going to go back to him. It's funny, I have pictures of the. We're in our fourth office right now. I'll take you for a quick little tour in a minute. But it's so funny that John came in and Evan and I both come from blue collar families. So, you know, both of our parents, I guess our fathers worked. Evan's dad worked in an oil field area and my dad is an electrician for the city. So, you know, they're up early in the morning, they work there 8 to 10, 12 plus hours, hour days and they come home, have dinner and this has been their entire lives, 20, 30, 40 years. You know, in unions they get a pension. Very well taken care of now. So that was kind of installed in Evan and I and it was something we both agree on. You know, Evan and I lived together when this company started and you know, we were up at 7am, ate breakfast, we worked until 5 or 6 and then you know, we would go spend a few hours doing whatever we wanted. And then it was gin and tonics and ping Pong from 8 till 10. Just talking about what happens when this actually turns into a real life thing and we're not working in our apartment. Two, three years later. I can't wait to show you the rest of the office. So John came in and he really embodied that work ethic. Vishen Lakhani from Mindvalley and his team did a really big study a couple years ago on attitudes versus skill sets. When you're doing some initial hires and out of like 100 characteristics, only 5 to 10 were actual skills that people wanted. But the attitude was more important of what you look for in a first hire. So I think attitude is really critical on your first few hires. Of course we want people with great skills, that's obvious. But you want someone who fits the attitude and is going to get along with people and help with that. John, all the people in my company and that have ever met him will agree with this. The guy comes in, he's either two minutes late or right on the button. He puts his headphones on, he's a graphic designer and front end engineer. He literally works right up until lunch, takes a half an hour lunch break, works for the rest of the day, says two or three words to everyone in the company. And Evan and I loved this as our third hire because he motivated us to work harder as well. This guy came in, put in work, we weren't paying him a ton when we first started and I think that his work ethic, you know, he's been with us for three years now and like everyone that comes in the door knows that John has this like he doesn't say a lot but you know, he gets a ton of work done and we constantly compliment him and he just crushes it out. And he likes to learn too, which is another thing that was really good. We do quarterly reviews with employees and we also just go for lunches and have fun. But when you ask John when he wants to learn, he's like, man, my JavaScript skills aren't good enough. I really want to work on these or different things. On front end engineering, he was initially a graphic designer, which he's great at, but he wanted to really up his skill set and constantly learn. So he was a really critical hire. And we found him on Craigslist, kind of kijiji in. In Canada. Did our first interview. It was horrible. We're like, what do you like to do? Oh, you're good at this. Show us some of your work. Okay. It's great. Do you want to start tomorrow? Okay, you can start on next Friday. Perfect. Let's do this. You want to move to town? Great. Not proper. So I could talk a little bit more about hiring maybe in a further one of like kind of what I can just actually quickly. Our structure today at like, I probably hired 30 people now, maybe more. We do a application survey online. We just have a Google form. It's got about 30 questions in it. We want people to put some time in. You know, we ask them some fun questions as well. Then we do a phone call interview where it's either 15 minutes with who their manager would be if they like them, 15, 20 minutes. And then if they like them, we do a reference check. And then I come in, have a quick, quick chat with them. And if things are still vibing really well, we move forward and give out an offer. That's what it looks like now. Before it was just, hey, like, you sound great. You want to come in and you know, we'll have a coffee and chat about this. When you're starting off, that works, but it's not going to last forever. But yeah, definitely. Attitude over skill with your first hire. I think that's super critical. Third thing we're going to talk about 16 minutes in. I feel like my camera's probably going to die. I've never done this before. Team gatherings. So let's go for a tour around the office for a moment. So you're currently in my office. Got a little board there. A few outings. That's a mess. Sorry. It's real whiteboards everywhere. That just got hung up. Hey, over here. Nice. You look good on camera today, buddy. Okay. Gotta have a bookshelf, you know, give your employees books. It's a great idea. This is kind of our common area. I'm gonna rip through this. This is where we sit. And we have retro tude, which I'll talk about soon. Evan's office. Also whiteboard, tv, some things. Yeah. So we're in about I don't know how many square feet it is. It's large, though. This is the corporate control center where Lisa, who I told you I begged for two years to come work for me is. This is our customer success department. We got Eden and Aaron in here. We got Hawaii. I think Jordan's got a palm tree in here. This is Jaybird's office. Really nice inflatable palm tree. It's pretty cold outside. Actually, this is John's office. Longest standing employee. Again, he doesn't talk very much, so he doesn't need too much. So we'll get out of this hallway. We got. Yeah, central. Central area. That's our gratitude board. All those little post its are some of the everyone's favorite gratitudes. The conjoined triangles of success. If any of you have watched Silicon Valley nerd Olympics as well, that's a great team gathering. The boardroom, the emotion wheel. I'll talk about this in retro to it as well. Boardroom conference call thing there. More whiteboards. This is our reception area. No one works here. Got a bunch of startup vitamins. These posters are fantastic. There's like a server room and storage back there. It's a hallway kind of. I don't know what that's for. Hi, Root again. This is our hangout area. This office is empty. There's a couple bathrooms. Hopefully a shower suit. More whiteboards. Peter Gregory's office. Zach's office. He just had a little one named Violet and he's got some really nice Lego. Oh, this isn't going to auto adjust there? Nope. Okay, well, whatever. This is a beautiful office. I love how he's done it. Data miners Union. These are our students that come in. Their computers. Wouldn't surprise me if they're still working right now. It's the beauty of having computers work for you. That's our VR corner. Max's office. He does our data marketing. Brian and Graham. There's a lot of brain power in that room. Vikash does our content and marketing. Some advertising stuff. Yeah. More whiteboard. This room is. There's a lot of brain power in here. They're working on some of our evaluation methodologies. Another whiteboard for how we dictate what the value of a home is in any given zip code, city, neighborhood. This is going to be a war room. Thanks, Tai Lopez, for giving us that suggestion. More bathrooms and stuff. More bathrooms. We got two ping pong tables. This room's pretty bare. We just moved in bike racks. The kitchen, probably everyone's favorite place. Stocked up with food. We Got all the coffee and espresso machines. There's always kombucha, sparkling water machine back there. The king table. It's one of my favorite tables. Shout out to beachcombers for that. And Rupert, of course, he belongs in everything. But now we'll go back to my office and finish talking about. But now you guys can at least kind of understand how lucky we are. So my corporate culture is friggin pretty great. I'll say. Actually, we have someone who's Eden's gonna maybe make a rap song about it, apparently, which I'm pretty fired up about. Actually. No, I lied. I'm super fired up about it. So she's going to. I'm gonna actually probably just do like a quick. It'll actually allow me to not have to film for 60 minutes because she's gonna make a rap video. And then I have a quick little video where I walk around to everyone on my team just randomly throughout the day with my little iPhone and I'm like, hey, what's your favorite part about this company? And I think I got a lot of really good answers. So talking about team gathering, we're blessed, super grateful to be in an office space like this. This is our fourth office. We started at 500 square feet. We went up to just over 1500 square feet with five people or four people because 500 square feet is really tight and there's a one bathroom. And when you walked someone to the bathroom and then walked out, it was like kind of smelly. So you didn't want to be there. So we had to move out of there second office. It's not awkward. It was more of a retail location. We lasted one year there. Ended up having some neighbor problems, building problems, all kinds of stuff. Then we moved into another office where we scaled up to almost like 25 people. And it was about 2,500 square feet. It was expensive, even though it wasn't in the nicest part of town. We had a break in earlier this year, so now we're here. And this place is crazy. But I look at it as an investment. As a tech company. A big part to acquiring great talent is by having a great place to work. So having stocked fridges, having coffee, water everywhere. We give out lunches on Friday and we all get together and talk about how the week went or what they're doing this weekend. You know, we just scheduled a Tuesday tea time where someone comes in with their favorite tea and brews tea. We are doing board games. Evan loves to go to laser tag, bowling's another thing, we have Nerd Olympics, which is kind of like a community event where we get, I don't know, 50 to 100 people in the community together just to have fun and bond together. So we have a lot of things like that. If you want help on planning those, I can do my best. I've never really been the one in charge of that. I always try and hand that off to someone else. It's not my favorite thing to do. So. But for team planning, Even if you're two people or three people or 10 or 20, weekly planning is critical. So we have, I have a couple different methodologies on this. You can do a stand up meeting every single day. 10 minutes, get your team up in a circle, call at 10. At 10 or 9. At 9, everyone depart. Every single person in your company, get together, stand in a circle, say a prayer, hold hands. I don't care what you do, do a team mantra like Walmart, whatever it is, talk about what you're working on, what your biggest problem is. Go around the circle, do that, see if anyone can be helped. If you do that every day, you can alleviate a lot of problems and a lot of wasted productivity. So if that becomes too tedious, especially once you grow into a bigger team, that can be Once you're 15 people, everyone in a circle every morning. It disrupts productivity 100%. So the other option that you can do, we have a department head holds a planning meeting on every single Monday morning for however long it takes, whether it's 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, whatever it is. But he'll take his entire team or her entire team. Sit down. This is what we did last week. This is what we're work on this week. Does anyone have any issues? And so, you know, let's say we have, we got Max, we got Graham, we got Brian, we got Jordan, we got Evan, and then we got. That's it. So, Max, top three tasks of last week, what'd you get done? Why didn't you get it done? If it's done now, what are you working on this week? And we just do this in Google Drive. It's shared with everyone so they can go in, fill it out. They fill it out beforehand so that we don't waste too much time in the meetings. And we do that for all departments, customer service and for, you know, finance, HR stuff and then all the engineering and, I don't know, marketing, graphics stuff. We're still getting better at this. We're not by any means perfect at it. And it takes a lot of time to build the structure. That's a weekly basis on a monthly. Depending on how big your team is, you need to absolutely go through every single week with your team of the last month. Figure out what you got done, figure out why you missed things, what you need to work on, plan out the next month. You should know exactly what's going to happen in the next 30 days. I'd say the exact same thing for quarterly planning as well. Look back at the last three months and like, where you had issues, what were red flags? It's tedious, it's time consuming. It shouldn't take up that much time. It's like if you actually do the overall thing, it's less than 2% of time in a week annually. So it's not too bad, but critical due to the fact that you're going to miss things, you're going to forget about lessons that you've learned and you really do want to document all that. Keep it in Google Drive, keep it on whatever you save all your stuff in. This is really valuable to share with people, especially if you're going to get investment. I think that should be another talk that I should have. I'm just gonna keep this one on corporate culture. We're already at 25 minutes, but those are big ones. Yeah. Again, I hit team events monthly and quarterly, weekly planning, team gathering. Another good one we did last year was an off site at Christmas time. We went to Big White, which is about an hour away from here. The entire team, everyone brought their significant other. We stayed in condos for two or three days. Three days, I think that's the minimum. And we skied, snowboard, drank, went to a wine fet, went to a wine little festival and got to try like 70 wines. Amazing time and a beautiful place. Great team bonding. You know, there really wasn't a huge agenda. It was go and enjoy the weather, you know, get to know your team a little bit better, have some fun. At night we played a lot of games. We were with another tech company called Straw House Labs down there. They rented a really nice house cabin and we all got together and had a party. It was a blast. If you want to talk about things like that, I think off sites are another good thing. We're just starting to implement AGMs and board meetings. So I'll get back to all of you on that fourth thing. Office fun. You gotta have fun. This is critical. I cannot tell you or stress enough that if you don't have a little bit of fun in your office environment, it's Gonna be boring. People aren't gonna like coming to work. You want people to enjoy where they're working, that you want them to want to come in. And a big part of this. Personally, I'm lucky. I love to have fun. I love to play ping pong, I love to crack jokes. I love to play shitty music way too loud to make everyone listen to it. I like to distract people sometimes and ride around on a hoverboard like all kinds of crazy things. I like to shoot people with Nerf guns. I love to, you know, go buy donuts for the whole team, make people smile. We have a bunch of very funny characters in here who are highly intelligent. It's a lot of fun to be here. And while I can't really give you a whole ton of advice on how to do this, you gotta know that if you're a one person team or a five or 10 or 20 person team, a lot of this just trickles down. As CEO, no matter what, if your CEO is a dick, of course people are going to be dicks. I'm guilty of this. I come in all the time in a bad mood and you know a big reason? There's a couple people here are to just, Josh, get it together. You are in a bad mood. Either go home or go get a coffee, go for a walk, go for a run, come back, be in the right head space that's critical. And I've taken that to heart. I'm a terrible person when I come in here and I'm bored, I don't have something to do, I micromanage stuff that I shouldn't be touching or I'm just not happy. There's really no reason to not be happy. I'm not a huge fan of the grind, grind, grind Gary Vaynerchuk stuff, but we're super, super spoiled. I had one of the best days last week on Saturday at thrive of my life. I will never forget this day. It was precious to me. It will like sit there and like the day my mom beat breast cancer, the day I got my first house, the day I started this company, like this day will sit there with those. I'll never ever forget them. And like, you know, I came back really inspired and motivated and wanting to share that with my team. And also highly emotional. I think that as a leader, if you can get on an emotional level with your employees, which I very struggle with. I've spent the last year of my life extremely focused on this and being vulnerable. That emotional wheel that sits in that room, I'll Talk about it for retrospective. That we do, you know, changed my life big time. Raul. Oh, we're back. I got paused. I don't know what happened there. So, yeah, the emotional wheel and working on my EQ throughout the last year. Yeah, I don't want to get emotional right now, but, you know, as a CEO, kind of like I was talking about later, you do a lot earlier, you do a lot of firefighting, and you learn to just, like, compartmentalize, shove down, get rid of it, and, like, on to the next thing, which is easy. That's not a hard thing to do. The hard part of it. And there's a book I recommend, the 15 consciousness. 15 steps of consciousness Leadership. I don't know. I have it here. I'll put a link down there. But, like, changed my life. Radical honesty. And the biggest one that I learned this year was hard conversations. You know, I stopped communicating with a lot of people that I didn't feel aligned with, that I didn't provide value to, and vice versa or there wasn't a lot of, like, need to be friends with them or in relationships with them and who they were. So, you know, that was a really hard thing for me to do. But, you know, it allowed me to open up to so many amazing people. I've met some people this year that didn't just, like, not a little change in my life, like, dramatic change in my life. And I'm so, so stoked up about it. Fired up. Yeah. Like, I got Raul and Evan from Monday. Like, so intelligent, amazing, human. So much love. Taught me so much about, you know, being in the moment and presence and helping people and wanting to do good in the world. Cole and Sonya, like, amazing. Like, put on this big conference. Amazing family, mad love for each other and, like, doing great in the world and also making tons of money. Like, what else? Not many things sound better than that. So I'm super down with that. I don't even know where I was going with all that stuff. Office fun was kind of the topic that I was on in retrospective and doing a lot of emotional intelligence work. If you get on a level where you can communicate with your employees or whoever you're working with and have really hard conversations, you'll make huge leaps and bounds, which allows you to have so much more fun. If you resent someone for something or you have a grudge or something that they're doing, doesn't all line with you and you feel uncomfortable about it. There's the compartmentalize it, push it down, or there's the head it face on. Hey, this is my issue. I need to address it with you. This moment right here is terrifying for everyone, but it honestly will change your life. It's so amazing how valuable it is. Once you take that step and you move forward, you'll notice your relationship will get so much better and vice versa, they'll reciprocate it. So when they have an issue with you, they're going to bring it to you and then you guys can resolve it and your relationship will be so much better. This has been a massive thing for Evan and I is scaling company. Some people talk about scaling a company in people. You go from 1, 3, 10, 30, 100, 300, 1000. That's kind of a metric that you'll read in some books, but. And your systems will break it. Every single one. That's true. Guaranteed. That's true. That number won't be exact, but it will happen every single time to every single company that's built. Guaranteed. What's also going to happen? Talk about making fucking money. Make 100 grand a year. Make 500 grand a year. Make a million dollars a year. Make 5 million, make 10 million. Make 100 million. Make 500 million, make a billion. I guarantee every single one of your systems is going to break when you hit a huge milestone too. I don't know what the exact numbers are going to be on that scale. Something's going to happen and it's terrifying. And so Evan and I have had tons of issues around this. We don't talk about it. We would just put it down, go our separate ways, go do our things. Now we actually just head on. Like, fuck, dude, what you did really made me mad. That word you said didn't sit well with me. We need to talk about this. And it's amazing. Amazing will change your relationship. It also frees up a lot of room for you, for whoever it's with, to have a lot of fun together, appreciate each other, show gratitude, really look at like, how valuable and integral they are to your life and how important they are to you. I had a hard falling out with someone who was super close to me at the company and things didn't work out. Things were said and it's like there's nothing more that I can tell anyone than how much I truly cared about them and wanted the best for them. It's just where I was at and where they were at. They didn't mesh anymore. We were just like this. And I'm on this rocket ship. I want to be way the fuck up Here, and I'm only here. I'm going to get there, but I'm going to work really, really hard, and I need. That really pushed me there, and I can't have this. I need to have this. So you got to be really close to people and be open to them, and then that allows you to have all the fun in the world. People are going to tell you what makes them the happiest, and then you can do that. I have a guy in the office here. Brilliant human, amazing Brian. How I met him. Like, I honestly was at a bar one night, and a friend was like, hey, this guy used to work at Google. He's really smart. He's in town. Get him a drink, blah, blah, blah. We start chatting. Nothing comes of it. Whatever. Three weeks later, turns out, out of nowhere, I know his sister randomly, and she's like, oh, my brother said he met you. He said you guys were really cool. And I was like, are you fucking kidding me? He stood me up. He didn't call me back. Make him call me back. He called me back. He started working a couple weeks later. Now he's, like, a really good friend. Been with us for a year and something, and we went to Japan together. So I'm sitting down with him. I'm like, dude, you're one of my. Like, you are. You've solved so many massive problems for this company. I love everything that you've done. Money's probably not your biggest driver. We're giving you a raise. What else can I do for you? Is there anything I can do for you? The guy, literally, because we're so close. Not so close, but, like, you know, we've been working here for a year. We talk enough, we have coffee enough. We work together. He said he wanted to go to Japan. I pulled out my laptop, got on our travel points on our American Express, and booked us a trip to Japan. Things like that. You could have so much more fun when you can talk to people. I'm like, that is how your office is gonna be allowed to have more fun is you need to be very close with everyone, especially your founding team. Like, you guys got to be on the best terms. So what I'm saying here is have hard conversations. These are mandatory. That's Brian, too, dude. I hunted him down. When I want something, I go and get it almost always. And employees, like, there's four or five people here that, like, I was pretty relentless about. So if you're. If you want someone to work for you, make sure they're fucking up every single One of those people is so much smarter than I am. Like, I shouldn't. Don't tell them that. I don't know if they'll ever see this. It's pretty far into the video. But like, seriously, these people blow my mind. They're so intelligent. I love working beside them. It's amazing. Okay. The fifth thing, Retro tude and the emotional wheel Retrospective is something that Techstars taught me. the end of every week, we would sit down as a group. Wait, we had a different night for this. But not at techstars but at my company. Now at dad Nernst. This is what we do. We get together as a group. Everyone gets a glass of wine, grabs a beer, grabs a, you know, soda, whatever you want, some candy, some snacks. We sit in a circle, whether it's at the boardroom table or in the room right there, and we have three questions. We don't do this every week, but it did work really well. And we did it for three or four months in a row. We asked, what are your energy levels today? And then we ask a personal red, yellow, green. Just answer whatever it is. If you feel like elaborating, feel free, and then work red, yellow, green for the week and you can pass it. No one is obligated to be a part of this. So we did that. We would actually track it. And it was really valuable for myself as CEO and HR and other people in the company because they can see if people aren't in a good head space or they're in a great headspace to and we can let them be and they're having a great time. So we would do that. That was the structure of it. We'd go around the circle and then we would pick something off the emotion wheel, which I showed you guys earlier in that room. It's literally just. You could Google emotion wheel. We got it printed out on like a four by four and there's like 50 or 60 different emotions on it. Some people don't like it and we'll just throw a dart. Other people will dive right in and tell you all about it. And then it's just a quick note after if anyone wants to elaborate on anything that they have to do. So we would do that. That was called retrospective. And then obviously when you're with your team of five or 10 or 50 people, you know, you might have to do IT departments. Once you get too big, you'll get to a point where, you know, everything is just a quiet down, people are having fun, it's a Friday Afternoon. So then we have the gratitude box, which I'm going to go grab quick. Okay. Okay. That took me a second, but I'm sure you can see this. I may not look pretty, but I'm full of gratitude. And then there's quotes around it, etc. Etc. And people all week long, when something good happens, they put a post it in this and on Friday afternoon, whoever feels like it, whoever grabs the box first, opens it up and reads it all to the team. There's no name. There's sometimes names involved, but we express gratitude for one of each other and things that we enjoy throughout the week and some of our favorite moments. And I think that this brings a cohesiveness to our team, that it takes a while to get comfortable to everyone to get comfortable and especially if they're new to the company. But you know, it's fascinating. You'll see new employees just sit there and they're kind of, maybe if they're not too comfortable yet, they don't know everyone. They don't really feel like sharing personal information with them. You'll see people just open up and it becomes a great way to transition into the weekend to end the week off, to say thank you to everyone around you and how much you appreciate them. And it's just been an amazing learning experience for me to see how everyone reacts to each other. I just get. Sometimes I get in trouble for being too quiet because I'm like, I'm so infatuated and I want to learn what everyone in my company, how their week went and I want to know. But I get CEO stuff pulling me around all week and this. There, there, there. So, you know, every once in a while on Friday afternoon, I know that I have an hour, 92 hour minutes to 2 hour minutes. Jesus. An hour, 90 minutes or 2 hours to hang out with my team, kick back, put my legs up. I usually drink my favorite sparkling waters. Sometimes there'll be a little special vodka or something in there, but it's changed our game. I have a complete format for it I can share with all of you. I love just getting on calls and seeing where people are at and seeing little things that you guys can do to make it amazing. Oh, damn, I made it to 40 minutes. Oh my goodness. You know what the biggest problem is right now that I am extremely pissed off about is that I have that new MacBook with all the dongles on it and this is getting taped on the SD card and that SD card doesn't fit into my dongle. This is a problem Shit's infuriating. Mac. I don't know why you did that. Okay, final notes, final notes. What else can I say about company culture? Peter Drucker said that company culture eats strategy. Wait, I think I wrote this down somewhere actually. Oh, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Peter Drucker. Create the kind of workplace and company culture that will attract great talent. If you have brilliant people, they will make work feel like more like play. Sir Richard Branson. One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that's happy with its success. Mark Parker, CEO of Nike. That one punches me in the face every single day. And I know deep down inside of me that it's something I will never, ever become. I'm going to have way too much fun. I'm going to be way too successful to ever become some bureaucratic company where it's top down management. This is how I think it should be. Actually, I'll draw another picture because I think that as CEO, if your mindset's this and you're empowering every single one of your employees to be their best selves and you want them to be just killing it, this might end up looking like an mlm. I've never tried to draw this before. So many of these big bureaucratic companies look like this. Here's the CEO. Management1 management2 management. Or we'll call these the C level people. C level people. And then. You know everyone. And then you know, it goes down the list. It goes down the list. It goes down the list. It'll get so big that eventually this person doesn't even know this person. That is unacceptable. That should not be allowed. That should not be allowed. These people are the most important people in your company. I don't care what level you're at, if this is you, these people, I want them to be the most important in my company. To know that you care about them. You want them to learn. You're supposed to empower them. You want them to come to your office. You want them to do amazing things. You want to spend time with them. People are dedicating hours of their week to you. You should not be sitting up here on your high horse. Don't ever think that. Flip it upside down. Here it is. I want everyone on my team. Oh, wow. I forgot how to draw. I'm going to do X's because it takes too long. I don't know how to draw this. Oh, my God. I actually don't know what I was trying to go with. This. I want my team to be all together. Actually, fuck it. I know exactly how this looks. I don't know how many people we have now, But here's how I want my team to be. I want us all to be equal. This isn't Enron. We don't write this shit on the wall and do a bunch of illegal stuff. We work together. This is not a top down organization. I want everyone to feel like they have just as much responsibility, ways of doing that. Equity is a huge thing. Give people equity, incentivize them, know that they have a bonus coming. I'm guilty of this as well. I'm still working on those things for my people. But in the long run, I want my team to look like that. And if anything, it's like I'm right in there with them. I'm the exact same. I've never considered myself. I didn't like the first time I had to put CEO on my business card. I don't like when people come in and it's like, hey boss, like that drives me nuts. My name is Josh. I'm here to work with you. I have just as much stuff to do as you do. Let's work together. Let's have some coffee, maybe a donut or something. Maple syrup, of course, because we're Canadian. And then let's crush some. Work together. Let's work on a problem together. Let's solve it. Let's have fun. This, this doesn't allow these people to have a ton of fun when they're just getting bossed around by this guy. And then they never get to see this guy because he's out enjoying his life, flying on jets and being on yachts and not working that hard and making all the money. That's not how this should be. I want it to be all of us working together, trying to accomplish a problem. I feel like I ranted a lot today and if I have any final thoughts that I could share with you guys on company culture, it's gonna create itself. Be a good human and watch it just spread out throughout your organization. If you're gonna be shitty, that's how your company is gonna be. I can't stress that enough. I want to see amazing companies where people love going to work and they love what they're working on. But you know, that doesn't exist a lot. Like there's a stat out there that says 80% of the people in North America aren't happy with their job. It's kind of unacceptable. But it allows little startups like us to go and steal their best talent. So keep that in mind. But I think I'm gonna sign off for there. I'm hoping that the end of this is going to be a rap video from one of our employees. She's only been here for like four or five months, but she's got this sick rapping skill in the background. Maybe it's edutainment, this new word that everyone was talking about. That's so cool. But. But thanks for your time today. Leave some comments below. I can only make this better, and I'm trying to speak of these things from experience. I don't want to tell you guys what I read in a book or what I read on the Internet or someone told me this, or I saw it at another company. I don't really know how those things work, but I'm trying to have a ton of fun and build an amazing company that takes over the world. Maybe one day buy Microsoft and shut it down. Who knows? But thank you for your time. Again, if you want me to talk about other things, I think there was Raising venture capital was another one I'm actively going through. My first round hiring was probably one on there and I think it was like cadences and KPIs and how to really, really dive deep into planning things. That's something I've worked on so hard for the last year of my life. Like, I know what 2021 looks like for me right now, so that's a huge part of it of being a good CEO. You're manning the ship. Everyone's got to know they're helping you. They're paddling. They got to know where they're going and you got to be able to express that to them. And for us at Data Nerds, we're going to be the gold standard at providing data. It's going to be our focus has been real estate data and property data. But there is a much, much larger opportunity out there just aggregating all of this data that's siloed in all these millions of different places, bringing it together and allowing people to use it. So thank you so much. Peace.