Build A Culture That Scales: Lessons from Glassdoor's Highest Rated SaaS Company

I am very much thrilled to be in such a beautiful venue. Nikolai has told me that every time I come to Paris, he gets his portrait on the wall and there's a lovely crowd. So I'm really honored to be here to do a fireside chat with him.

You got your portrait over there.

Well, I'll start by introducing somebody who I admire very much. Nicholas has been a huge inspiration to me. He has shown that you can sell awesome products to developers. He has built a wonderful company and not only that, he was just named one of the number one SaaS company to work for on Glassdoor. So not only a brilliant guy who's building a company, but he's also paying attention to the internal culture. So today we're going to talk about culture and how that fits into startups.

Thank you, Edith. Yeah. How to start? Maybe a few words about Algolia and then we're going to it. In case you don't know us, Algolia is a search API. We basically help businesses to deliver a great search experience on their own websites, on their own apps. So if you search on Twitch or Under Armour or Medium, you're basically using us. We met with Edith. Was that three years ago actually, because of Jason, the guy there. Because Jason invited me to speak about failures at Heavybit and Edith was there at that time. Maybe you can explain a bit more about. You do too?

Yeah. I'm Edith. I'm the CEO and co founder of LaunchDarkly. We do feature management platform. We allow SaaS companies to turn on and off features for their own customers and do slow rollouts. So we have European customers like Typeform, Contentful and Apiary. So it's great to be here in Europe.

A lot of API you want to eat.

So something we were talking about before is that we both have a technical background and so we were talking about how you can approach culture at a company as a product. Can you talk a little bit about how you've approached culture and why it's.

Important you know culture as a product. How do you think about product? You have versions, you have iterations, you have bugs, you have release and rollbacks. So basically a culture is a living thing. You've never finished your culture, like you've never finished your product. You may even have a roadmap for your culture. What's the next steps you want to build? Maybe we can speak about the history of the culture, how it changed, how it failed, what we had to change. I know you had some experience also on your side on this one. You Want to start speaking of launchdarkly first and then I kind of continue with our version.

I'll be up front. I did not start the company when I was in my 20s, I was in my 30s, so it was deliberate that my co founder and I wanted to have a company that we wanted to work at. You know, we knew we wanted to go to work every day and you know, we work hard but just feel like this was a place where people wanted to come to work. So culture was something we deliberately tried to incorporate in terms of are we enjoying ourselves, are our employees enjoying ourselves? Because then I think it shows the product and it shows in the experience you're delivering to your customers. How did you approach it?

Yeah, so it changed a lot with time. The first thing is that in our case, I mean, we're in our 30s too and we knew what we didn't want to have in the company. We had worked at big companies before, suffered a little from that and wanted to make sure as co founders that we're completely aligned on the type of company we wanted to build. We didn't speak about culture as like kind of a concept yet, but that was basically what we were discussing. And for us that was around that concept of ownership. We wanted to create a company of owners, people who would get out of their comfort zone, take initiatives, behave like they were the owners of the company basically. And we didn't do, I mean, we didn't hire anyone for one year. So it was really the inception of the company. Actually, I gave my notice the day after we agreed on the type of company we were going to build. Wow.

So it was just you and the co founders for how long?

About one year.

And then when you hired your first employees, how did the culture change?

Well, in the beginning everything was alright. The thing is that when we arrived, I don't know, like when we got to nine, 10 people, things started to break already. Okay. We had that culture in mind. We knew what we wanted. We were making sure during the interview process, we were discussing about that we are pitching our culture. But the thing is that when people join you, they are going to revert to their habits. That's human.

What do you consider a bad habit? Because we had the same break point when we were up to about 10 people, we would make everybody go to lunch with us and we would make sure that, you know, this is somebody that we wanted to get lunch with. But then when we get bigger, it starts to break. So what was breaking for you starting to break?

Like decision process. You want Owners, you want people to take initiatives, you don't want them to take orders, and simply they were some time waiting or not taking the right initiatives or I'm not behaving like if it was their company.

How did you fix that?

Simple fix. We wrote down what we meant by ownership, by what was our culture. That was a simple wiki page, like one page long, explaining what we were doing, and that was it.

Did it work?

I mean, until some point, like until maybe 30, 40 people. That's when it broke again.

Yeah. It's interesting. We were talking about how you have all these breakpoints at different stages. Like, 30 is kind of the stage where you start to have to have managers of managers.

You got it. That's actually a good example of what was not working so well when we were like 40 people. What happened is that you would. We would ask something and oh, no, we cannot do that at algorithm. Why? Because it's not in our culture. Why? What do you mean by that? And that was the case with management. Why can't we have managers? Because it's our culture. Why? I mean, our culture is to be flat. We want owners who are flat. We're not going to grow at 1,000 people being flat. So that's when we realized that we had to go beyond a simple wiki page and we started the work that was in 2016, a bit more than two years ago, to define really who we were. So that ended up in five core values and really separating who we are. The core values of the company and how we work, how we work should change every day. As you scale having managers, manager of managers, you simply cannot work the same at 10, 30, 200, 1000. So that should change constantly. Who you are should barely change.

Yeah, I mean, something we were talking about is that the stuff that got you to where you are might not get you to here. And that culture, you said sometimes people think of culture as a compromise where culture should really help you grow.

Many people think that. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of like common assumption that either you choose culture or you could choose growth. You have to make a choice. You cannot keep a great culture if you want to grow fast. I believe that it's very wrong. I think it's true at the short term, but it's creating a culture of debt, you know, like that notion of technical debt that we all have in our companies. You need to revisit that and constantly reimburse it, otherwise it gets too big. I think culture is worse if you start creating some culture of Debt repaying back culture of debt is way more difficult because people, you create habits, you create a behavior and people are going to. It's so difficult to change the way you work. So you need to be very intentional on the way you want to work today and tomorrow. And that helps. Like, I don't want to speak too much about like the glassdoor thing, but actually that's because of the culture and because of that, that helps us to hire. I mean, you know how it is. Like the biggest competition for us is to find the right talents. And having a great culture is going to help you attract the right talents.

Yeah. Advice I got was the footpaths that you make in your company. The early, you know, little foot trails become the superhighways of three years later.

That's very true. We're actually also discussing about sales in an engineering company, which is a big part, a big challenge for a culture of a tech company. Both Edith and I have a sales motion for our product. You want to share how you do that?

Yeah. So I like you. Our first year was basically just building the product. So we had all engineers. I was the salesperson and I had been at companies where there was this huge divide between sales and engineering. And it's really painful. I'm sure some of you here have been at a big company where sales and engineering are kind of at open warfare about why do the sales people get to go to club, why do these lazy engineers play foosball all day? And it's not a healthy culture. So something we try to do at launchdarkly is we sell to developers so our salespeople have to understand developers. So advice I got from you was very similar. Yeah, I got so much advice from you about make sure that your developers would buy from your salespeople because if they don't, you're not going to be able to sell to developers that are not yours. So we do a lot of things in our sales org that comes from engineering. Like we do a monthly retrospective where we go over what worked, what didn't work. And it's kind of like a no blame post mortem of just how can we get better? So that's part of our culture, is that we're very reflective. But I love, I mean, you're up to how many employees now?

Nearly 250 across.

How many offices?

Five offices.

So how do you make that work?

I'm not sure we have made that work yet. It's still very challenging. We were lucky to participate to y Combinator in 2014. And that pushed us to open an office in the US Very early on. And so very early on we had that two offices, Paris and San Francisco. And we had to figure out how to work together. And so we iterated. It's like culture. Like as a product, you basically iterate, you try to do new things. Some of the key things that helped us. Language, Only one language. We only speak English, including in our Paris office. So it's often surprising for people. That has actually been such a strength to attract very diverse candidates coming from all over Europe. And that was incredible. And it's a big asset today for us. We sell all over the world. So having people coming from everywhere is such an advantage.

Do you ever get pushback from candidates, you know, saying, hey, we're in Paris, why do I have to speak English?

Not really. I mean, kind of like it's a filter. We get, we get more attractive for foreigners, but we know that we don't have a full access to the local talent pool because not everyone speaks fluent English. So. Yes, but it's kind of like, you know, most of our customers are outside of France and we want everyone in the company to be as customer facing as possible. We want everyone to be able to speak with customers, to interact and engage. So of course we need them to be able to speak English.

What other things have you done to help you recruit the right people? Like we talked before about how culture fit can sometimes be a narrow way to get recruits. But how do you approach recruiting and getting people into your culture?

So the thing with culture, of course you want to make sure about who you hire. I don't really like the term culture fit because it goes basically against diversity. Because you are going to hire more of the people that fit your concept of who we are. You want culture additive people. You want like more values fit than the culture fit, which means that you need to test the values. So we have five core values and we are going to test each of them during interviews. Actually, interviewers, some of them have to check one value so they know which value they have to check. They have half an hour, they're going to check it. We equip them as much as possible with template questions so that they can pick from there if they don't know what to ask. And that's going to help make sure that the people are the right ones.

Yeah, that's kind of where the rubber hits the road. I mean, I had a challenging situation. We were interviewing somebody and he seemed very competent. And then every single reference call I did, they Opened with, well, you know, he's a jerk.

Did you hire him?

No, but it was very hard because, you know, these were, you know, like. And I'm like, well, how bad of a jerk? And they're like, people won't work with him anymore. I'm like, well, this is not somebody who's very competent.

Then be careful about that. Yeah, that's the worst that could happen. You're supposed to be a multiplier. You know, founders. The more people you have in the company, the more you think about your leverage, how you spend your time to multiply your impact. If you hire bad, like a jerk or someone who really doesn't fit in the culture in the company, that's the opposite of multiplayer, like a divider. Like, it's going to harm everyone else. Like, everyone is going to be less productive at the end of the day.

Yeah. And if there's somebody who you actively dread interacting with that shows up everywhere.

That would be a terrible choice to do that. You were like, 50 people today.

Yeah, we're 50.

Did you two have some bugs in your product? Culture. Product?

I think so. We just closed our B round. So we closed a $21 million B round, and a year before that, we closed about a $9 million a round. After the A, we were hiring very quickly, and I will put the blame on myself. I think I just assumed culture would happen. And we had about three people who joined and then very quickly quit because they just said, it's kind of sterile. It's boring. And I was like, well, this is a project then, you know, that's why I said that your company is a product. I was like, I'm not building a good product. You know, the stickiness is not there to put it in very. So, you know, the classic ways you look at a product is our you attracting people. Are you acquiring them and are you retaining them? And do they have referrals? I mean, that's. You can think of your company. So I'm like, I'm attracting people. I'm acquiring them, but I'm not retaining them. This is bad.

Did you change anything? Then?

We made an explicit okr. So we run off objective and Q results every quarter. We do objective OKRs around culture, which might sound a little dry, but every quarter we're like, okay, this is what we're going to do. And our OKR for this quarter is actually to hire a formal director of people because we realized that we were a size where all the initiatives I wanted us to do were bigger than I could really do.

That's also a big learning for us. Nobody, I mean, maybe second timers, but people building a company that have never done that before, it's impossible to anticipate the need of the people function. I mean, we are nearly 250 now. Last year we needed a year with one person in people. And that was definitely not easy. You have so much to put in place that you don't know about yet.

Yeah. And they're projects that take time. Like we wanted to do good performance reviews. And you realize to do good performance reviews, you really need somebody to own that. It's not something that you could just say, hey, let's go to performance reviews.

And then of course, don't forget about including culture in your reviews. You want to make sure that the people in your reviews are a good match for the culture. That's kind of a circle we go around all the time.

Yeah. So we talked about bugs and culture. So the thing I discovered is that I needed to pay attention to it. What other bugs or kinks that you have to work out?

Let's fast forward a little. Culture is a never ending project. So I told you last time, just before that the last big iteration was to create our culture. Key value, core values. It really worked well. I can still feel today we always had that. It's been a bit more than two years, but for me, we started with these core values. It's so core to us. We do everything to reinforce them. Sometimes very simple, by the way, like small hacks. I'm sure most of you use slack on equivalent. We created small emojis for culture. So every time someone displays some cultural values, we can add the small emoji on what they say. That's simple, but kind of reinforce constantly the culture. Every time we speak. And there is a way to refer to the culture. We do so too. But as we continue to scale the core values. I told you we separated the core values from the way we work. What we realized recently is that the way we work should receive as much attention as the core values. And that's something we didn't do so well before. So we were becoming a bit complacent about the values. They were so great. We have great value. So the culture is set. We're good on that. No, it's never finished. The way we work is not always great. We realized people, especially when you hire a lot of people, you can make sure they understand the values. But then they come with other habits too. So we have to. That's our current stage. We call that operating principles. So that's what we are working on today. Just to do the same intense work on the way we work as we did on the core values.

We. We do an onboarding session with every new hire where I. I walk through the history of the company and their values. Do. Do you do something similar with yours?

We do. So that I mean we iterate too. I mean some many things that don't scale. We still interview every single person Michael founder and I, but most of them half an hour founder chat and we split in the beginning we were doing like each of us was going to do a lunch with each hire. Well that doesn't work anymore.

That's a lot of lunches.

Well yeah, well that would be a lot of lunch today. I know what we do today. We split and we do group lunch. So I'm going to see after company is going to see the other half is based in Paris and based in San Francisco. So it's an easy split. So that's the way we do that then on the onboarding side actually that's something we are going to add. We are like refine. That's another thing onboarding constantly iterate on it. One for next iteration is to add a culture session done by the founders and not by other employees because we believe that's a great thing to bring. What else? One of the latest things I started to do, I mean three weeks ago so really recent is to do roundtables as a founder with individual contributors. So I would gather 8, 10 people of the same function, individual contributors, not the managers and ask them two questions in a roundtable fashion. What's the one thing that's really going well for you and what's the one thing that's really going bad for you and that triggers the conversation and that's incredible how much you learn from that as a founder. You just listen, you don't push back, you don't try to answer. Of course you want to act on what you learn after and that creates also discussion and they, I mean you listen and they feel they are listening too. That's a good one.

Yeah. I also got another tip from you about how you run your leadership team meetings that you, you start them with a check in.

We start with a checking around. Now just how are you doing? You know, like could be 10 seconds, could be 60 seconds each. But just to move from like you know, business. No before to go into business. Let's do that checking and see how you are feeling. And maybe something bad happened to you during the weekend. You want to speak it out, we can support each other. It kind of help us to communicate.

I took that. Except for we do it at the end and you always tell me I should do it at the start.

I think it's better at the start. I think we are out of time.

Yeah. So thank you so much for all your tips.

Thank you, Ed.