Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Mastering Cultural Assimilation: Maintaining Unique Company Culture in Hyper Growth

25 Aug 2023 · 0 min

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A short excerpt from a YouTube discussion (Jason M. Lemkin) about how to rethink hiring sequencing during hyper-growth (e.g., hitting $1M and growing 20%/month). The speakers propose a simple hiring-rate metric (new hires per period divided by current headcount) and argue that when that percentage is high incoming employees will influence company culture more than existing employees can stamp on them. Therefore strong cultural assimilation, clear principles, and onboarding are essential to preserve unique culture. Example: adding 2 people/month into a 100-person company has minimal cultural impact; higher ratios require deliberate assimilation.

If I'm lucky enough to hit a million in revenue growing 20% a month instead of 10, how should I rethink sequencing my hiring?
A rough, rough metric is the numerator and denominator on your hiring. So your denominator is the number of current employees, and let's say your numerator is the number of new employees you're going to add in a month or a quarter. As that percentage gets high, it actually means that the inbound people, the incoming people, are probably going to impart more on the organization than you can stamp on them. And so you have to be really good at cultural assimilation and have very strong principles and onboarding to try to preserve the parts of your culture that are unique and you really want to preserve because otherwise the people are going to bring with them because they're a bigger mass. So let's say you're adding two people a month and you have 100 people. The new people aren't going to change.
They learn their culture.
Yeah, but imagine you have 100 people and you're going to add 50 in a quarter, which actually does happen in hyper growth companies.