Assessing a startup’s culture before joining
thinkgrowth.org
thinkgrowth.org
1. Is there an atmosphere of energy?
2. Is the company bureaucratic?
3. Does the company do good work?
4. Are the people good at what they do?
5. Are they happy?
If you actually want to evaluate a startup's culture this is what I'd recommend:
1. Do they respect your time during the interview process?
If they give you a 'take-home assignment', an automated coding exercise, or a written test that's a huge red flag. Why? Because there's an asymmetry of effort. When you're interviewing with a software developer the company is devoting the same resources to your interview that you are. If they don't respect your time _before_ they hire then there's no way they will after they hire you.
On the same token, I've seen some companies do interviews where they require devs to come onsite and actually work with the team on a real project for an entire day. To me, that goes too far in the other direction towards not respecting my time.
2. Do they have competent leadership?
Insist on speaking to someone in a leadership position as part of your interview process (C level, director of engineering, etc). Do they have a deep understanding of their position? What was their background before they took this job? Are they a leader or just a manager?
3. How does the company evaluate performance?
Both yours and their own. If they can't give you a concise and well-defined answer avoid them like the plague.
This is an A+ point (but I'd apply it to all companies, not just startups.)
> 2. Do they have competent leadership?
How can you tell that from a brief conversation when corporate headhunters and boards frequently spend days talking to potential leaders and still manage to hire incompetent boobheads?
1. They don't tell they show.
CEO 1 told me his company has a culture of honesty and transparency.
CEO 2 told me, "This is an ambitious project. We've only got 18 months left of runway if we keep hiring at the rate we need to in order to get the product to market. We're confident that if we launch this year we'll be profitable enough to get further investment. It's high risk and high reward but I'm in the same boat you will be. If this doesn't work I'll be looking for a job too. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think we could do it."
CEO number 1 told me they were honest, CEO number 2 showed me.
And it's not just telling the truth, any statement they make about their company you should think about afterward and ask yourself what they did to demonstrate that statement.
2. Honesty deserves its own point.
When I interviewed at an internal startup of a Fortune 100 company the CTO told me, "The technology we're building is going to replace a lot of people at <parent company>. That means we have to be very careful about what we say and how we release things. I do my best to shield this team for the corporate politics above us but sometimes it slips through. They do pay the bills after all."
Every company has its benefits and drawbacks. It can be a legacy system that's difficult to work with, an industry that's heavily regulated, a bureaucratic organization, a codebase written by contractors, a talent shortage, or something else. They're hiring you to solve a problem. If they don't tell you what that problem is and the difficulty you'll face overcoming it then you should be highly skeptical.
If the job seems too good to be true it probably is.
3. They know where they add value and their limitations.
"How did I get my job? Basically, I was friends with the co-founder. Before this, I did market research at <large tech company>. I don't know enough about software development to build a tech org. That's what I want to hire you to do." - How one CEO started a conversation with me.
If you ever talk to an executive that thinks they're smarter than everyone else run like hell. Likewise ask what their day normally consists of (seriously, you'd be surprised by most answers).
The mentality that you want is that of a team. Everyone has their role to play and everyone they hired is a critical piece. I've found this also comes with a 'whatever it takes, just get things done mentality'. I've seen CTOs who personally refilled the office snack collection for months until they could hire an office manager.
4. They understand what skills are and are not transferable.
Ask them how they hire their managers and product owners. Look through the backgrounds of every executive at the company.
Equifax's Chief Information Security Office spent her entire career managing call centers. She had no background in either technology or security.
You might be tempted to say, 'so what management is a skill of its own.' True. But it's not a sufficient skill in and of itself. Hiring a manager for their management skills alone or a product owner just because of their experience being a product owner is like hiring a teacher just based on their experience teaching. Sure there are transferable skills every teacher has but you can't just throw that German History professor into a Nuclear Physics course and be like 'what it's all teaching'.
If there are any non-technical managers in charge of a technical worker's hard pass on the company. If any of the executives don't have a background in their field, hard pass. If they have product owners who are non-technical and have no background in the company's industry then get the fuck out.
5. Differentiate between managers and leaders.
Management and leadership are completely different skills. You want the latter.
Listen to how they tell the story of their company. Are they the center of attention or do they spend their time praising others? Ask how many people have left the company and why. Ask the lower level employees you interview with a question and see if the executive's answers match. Ask any technical manager when the last time they wrote a line of source code was.
What did they mean by this?
It deserved mentioning and it took up a couple paragraphs but at no point was it ever made clear what exactly needs to be mitigated or handled, other than vague statements about how it is undesirable in a start-up.
That is to say there isn’t necessarily a single right answer but there’s probably a right answer for you. Not that there aren’t plenty of pretty universally wrong answers too...
Being too attached to a product that has no business model, for example, and deluding yourself into thinking "I just have to explain it the right way and people will love it!"
Just to pick one I really do connect with: I’ve always paid a lot of attention to how employees treat their kitchen and also toilets. I had an eye opening experience in between interviews on the trading floor of a certain large investment bank that scared me off them (way back when).
There isn't any mentioning of basic things like:
* salary/equity rationing policies
* work-life balance and when/where crunch time is necessary
* growth/expansion planning (ie: from whom are the ideas coming from, from where are quantitative traction measurements coming from) and investment expectations (eg: business connections, networking, etc)
* how management is handling product hiccups (eg: pivoting), turn-over (eg: burn-out/mental health), public image blunders (eg: Uber-level PR nightmares with massive loss of face)
* communication channels between executive/non-executive decision making groups (ie: company direction transparency)
* mentoring and on-boarding new team members
* company's relationship with the tech community (eg: open-source contributions, meet-up hosting)
What does asking "What do departures look like?" have to do with identity politics?
Or encouraging readers to view Glassdoor reviews, speak to employees, observing the pride employees take in their working environment, or assessing the leadership of the org, for that matter?
The amount of defensiveness three sentences about diversity can draw out of people blows my mind a little bit.
>This is not a complete list, but here are some of the questions I think are worth exploring before joining any startup.