From 0 to $4B: Branch's Culture Playbook with Mada Seghete

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So I have this thing. I love dragons. If you come to my apartment, I have 100 dragons in all this. So I like to. Actually, I think culture is like a dragon in very early days. It's a baby dragon. You can tell it what to do. Obviously it's not perfect because you have to like really tell it what to do and move in direction, but it's small when you're accompanied 500 people, a thousand people, 10,000 people, it's a giant dragon and you cannot control it. You might be able to nudge it in a certain direction, but you cannot tell it where to go. It will have its own mind. So that's another reason why you should start early. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up, innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more.

Culture for me has been extremely important from day one. Who am I and why am I talking about culture? I started Branch about eight years ago. I lead marketing now, but I'm very involved in our culture.

And.

And before I was, I did all the jobs. I started as an engineer, I moved to product, and then I moved to marketing. And why branch? And why should you hear from. We're about 500 people now. Eight years later, 14 offices, 10 countries that make scaling culture a lot harder. I promise you. As we started moving internationally, it became extremely challenging. We have a big valuation that Lloyd put in the title of my presentation. I was like, lloyd, you make my presentation more bubbly. And this week you actually won a bunch of awards on best places to work, et cetera. This is why it would make sense for you to listen to some of my examples. But before we go into how you can actually go about culture. I actually think it's very important to pause and actually define culture to make sure we are all on the same page. So what is culture? Well, I've heard companies say talk about social events, benefits. Is it your people? Is it the parties that your company throws? Is it the fact that you have a ping pong table as a company or you don't? Is it the happiness of your employees? And when I ask people about culture and even a branch, I notice that people actually think about it very differently. Sometimes people define culture as the engagement of their employees and others do it as the benefits. And it depends on which team. And they all defined culture a little bit differently. So I went on this quest to try to define culture. This was about two years ago. So I read a lot of books. These are some of the, these are the best I read. I didn't put the ones that were maybe not as good then. I actually talked to a lot of employees from early who are at some of these companies early stage. So many of them now are founders, have their own companies. But I was curious, how did these companies that do well now, how did they start and what did they did in those 30 days around culture? So the definition that I actually came up with is the culture is the collective behavior of everyone in the organization. It's how leaders and managers commit to decisions, qualify, attract talent and run a healthy work environment. But actually, if you take all of that and you think of the better definition, and this comes from Ben Horowitz's book that I mentioned earlier, culture is best expressed to the actions of employees and managers when there's little supervision. So basically, if no one's watching, if you're out of the room, how will people make decisions and how will they behave? That's actually culture. That is a definition of culture. So when you think about defining and scaling your own company's culture, I have three lessons that I'm going to walk through today. The first lesson is that you have to start early and keep iterating. I'm not going to tell you how many friends I have who started companies. And they're like 50 people, 100 people. And they're like, we need to define our values and our culture. It's extremely hard to do that with 100 people in a room who all have a different opinion. So I think it's extremely important that you start early. And when you're like in those early days, I remember it was us, we were four founders in a room. We didn't have product market fit. And I was like, let's talk about our values. And my co founders were like, what? But okay. But now that we look back, it was actually so important that we came up and we got on the same page and what we look for in our workplace. The other thing that's really important here is that you actually don't have to come up with your values and stick with them forever and what your culture is. It's totally okay to iterate. And I think why, the reason why it's important to start early is as the size of a company grows over time, people's willingness to change, like, decreases. The bigger you become, the more people come with an expectation, the harder it is to get them to change. So I have this thing, I love dragons. If you come to my apartment, I have 100 dragons in all this. So I like to actually, I think culture is like a dragon in very early days. It's a baby dragon. You can tell it what to do. Obviously it's not perfect because you have to like really tell it what to do and move in direction. But it's small. When you're a company, it's 500 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people. It's a giant dragon and you cannot control it. You might be able to nudge it in a certain direction, but you cannot tell it where to go. It will have its own mind. So that's another reason why you should start early. The great thing though, is you actually have levers. So people think of the culture of this undefined thing, and they don't know how you can go about changing it. Actually, you can be extremely intentional. And there's a lot of levers you can actually pull here. So I'm gonna go through all of them. But it starts from values, hiring, onboarding, awards, how you celebrate things. And obviously the most important is actually as leaders, your actions. But let's start with values. Values is the thing that you start with. Early days, we went through a lot of iterations. These are our first four iterations. And actually this is iteration number five, our values now. And I think it's important to be okay with changing and iterating our values. And I'll give you one example of one that we change, changed. We started with one of our values being transparency. And the early days, we were extremely transparent. We were 4 people and 10 people and 15 people. And we had this email that you see on everything and anyone could join those threads. And then we started at 100 people who joined be, like, wow, I'm so overwhelmed when I join, I get hundreds of emails. I don't know where to find things. So we evolved transparency and we're still transparent as a company, but we evolved it in a value to actually communication, which is thoughtful transparency. And I think. But some of our values have stayed exactly the same. Initiative ownerships, we had those from very early on and those never really changed. The other one is, okay, you now have your values. The other one, that's really important. And people maybe don't think about that as so important, but it's actually one of the most important things in defining your culture. And I see many companies who only hire people because they are looking for someone in a job and they look for the skills and they hire that person. But it's actually extremely important that you also interview for your culture and for fit and for your values. In our case, we came up with four traits that are an embodiment of our values. So we look for people who are smart, driven, humble and collaborative. And we actually have an interview, we call it the bar raiser interview, where one of only a few people, a branch, can be bar raisers. They have to have been a branch for a while, embody our values and these tricks traits, and they have a veto type interview to make sure that the people that we hire actually are a fit and they share our values and they share these common traits that we look for in people. The other one, okay, so now you've set up your values, you hired someone, then onboarding is also extremely important. So when I started reading about culture, I actually worked with our people team and we changed our onboarding significantly. It used to be that people came and the first day was all about set up your computer, set up your payroll, and now it's really like an indoctrination to our culture. Before, we used to have every founder do a little bit of a talk. I talked about culture, our CEO talked about mission and vision, Mike talked about company norms. And we still actually do a lot of that. And now we also, we actually use a tool that people can watch our talks. But then we also come together and we meet everyone and we answer questions on those presentations. So we still meet every new employee. Even though we're 500 people, we I think sending swag and really helping someone understand who you are as a company and what their expectations are in those first few weeks is extremely important. The other thing that's a fun one is your space, obviously how what do you do with space in a hybrid world? While I still believe we're a hybrid company, so people still come to the space and there's off sites and there's ways that you can bring people together. So I think it's actually extremely important that when you do have a space and maybe that space is temporary, that actually your values shine through. So for example, this is some of our. I have this thing that every piece of art in our office needs to mean something. So that's a photo mosaic made out of logos of our customers or our first customer was an art app. So this is a piece of art that we bought from that app and we was our first piece of art. Ownership is one of our values. So this is my co founder and I and a few others have built a lot of our office furniture, for example. And even the logos on our walls have a meaning. Branches. I think we went through four different iterations and companies before branch and it really felt it was like our last live. This particular poster like really signifies that this, this was, this was our last live and we needed to make the other one is how you celebrate people is easier. Extremely important because the way when you celebrate people and you give shout outs, you are actually telling people this is my expectation of how you should behave. So we have something called Value Awards. Humility is one of our values. So we have founders and managers cook for our employees on employee appreciation day. But better one is actually how you do shout outs. So for a branch, collaboration is very important. Our motto is build, grow, win together. And I've heard people say that versus other companies. They feel a lot more supported and collaborative at branch. And I think part of that is when we give shout outs at all hands. We don't give shout outs to people. Oh, you climb on this mountain on your own. The majority of our shout outs are for people who actually help others and push other teams together. So it gives people the idea that like actually together is actually extremely important and helping collaborating others is more valued than actually doing that work completely on your own. Stories and communications are also super important. Telling the stories of things that you want repeated. So in our case, initiative is a value, right? So how can you encourage people to take initiative? You need to make sure that when they fail, they don't feel like they're going to get fired. So this we actually named all our conference room after failures. The majority of these are failures. So we know naming our company Epidemic right before an epidemic, naming our branch short links BNC lt and that was actually a spam link because we thought our links are branchlets and it was Not a good one. So we have a kindred with this photobook app that failed. So by having our names and people be able to read these failure stories, it helps them understand that they can actually fail themselves. I think telling the story of your company and helping people understand how you got to it, where you are. This is, this is an example of a slide. I like fantasy and dragons. So I tell the story of Branch in a fantasy land, but telling the stories of our initial failures and how we got to where we are so people understand that it's okay for them to take risks and fail us. This which gives me to a very important one, which I think is very hard to do. Think about the way you give people reviews, promotions and fired up so you don't have to read this. But this is basically our leveling grew big. And in DICE talk talk about our values. So to be able to move to the next level, you have to incorporate our values and our traits. And when we talk about promotions, those are important. And I think the harder one is even firing. If you care a lot about the value, you have to be willing, if someone really doesn't live up to it, to let them go. And we have examples of people who are amazing at their job, but for example, didn't experience humility and they thought they were better than everyone else. And people you didn't like working with them. And even though you might take a hit to your business, when you let go of someone like that, you have to make those hard decisions because that's the only way you can actually enforce your culture. And obviously the ultimate tool, the ultimate tool is actually your actions as leaders, as managers. It doesn't matter what you put on the wall. All the other things that I talked about before don't matter if you don't live up to it. If you say, oh, ownership, but you don't actually go and own your own stuff, then it doesn't. The others will think they're just words on a wall. So these are just some examples when you moved offices, my co founders building their own desk, or if there's not enough Mike not being okay taking a call from the bathroom at the time that wasn't finished. And I think there's just a lot of things that really tell who you are. Alex taking the trash out even though he's a CEO, those are things that actually tell people, hey, cumulative is important, for example, in our company. And as I think about the past few years, I think what's also really important is the idea that you have to Stick to your values. Adapting to hard situations while keeping your values alive actually really matters. So some examples is when big world changes happen, you have to really think, how do you maintain your values in a remote hybrid environment? How do you make sure that people actually come together and support each other? This is an example of us doing something for International Women's Day, like a flower arrangement to get people from different offices around the world to get to know each other. When you think about an economic downturn, budgets changing, how do you stick with your values? For us, impact is really important. So it's like focusing on things that have the most impact, being established, extremely numbers driven. If you have to do layoffs, which you had to do a few years ago, how do you do that? With humility, with support for others. How do you help the people who can't be in your company anymore find new jobs? How do you think about living up to your values even though you know you're going through hard times? So with that, I'm gonna end. Thank you so much. Remember, start early, use your levers and stick to your values and your culture, even through hard times.

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