After three years reporting on “Street Culture,” Street Fight looks back on five ways that company leaders are making their company culture stand out—and some of the best pieces of advice for doing the same at your business.
Category: Street Culture
Street Culture: Thumbtack Employees Driving Culture from the Bottom Up
Justin Angsuwat, Thumbtack’s vice president of people, says the Thumbtack team describes its company culture as the “Midwest of cultures.”
Street Culture: Invoca’s Lessons for Active, Engaged Growth
Based a mile from the beach in Santa Barbara, Invoca aims to maintain a culture in which employees know their ideas are important. The company sponsors softball games and ocean-side volleyball and boasts its own band.
Street Culture: A Culture of Growth at PacketZoom
“Introducing [new employees] to the culture has been very important; it’s important that the people we hire are growth-oriented,” PacketZoom co-founder Chetan Ahuja says. “We want them to already be useful to the business, but their main goal is to grow and to grow with the company. They’re much more valuable that way.”
Street Culture: mParticle CEO on Appreciating People and the Founder’s Journey
“We want people who have historically been lucky. People who have demonstrated the ability to go out and create their own luck,” CEO Michael Katz says. “People who are curious, who engage and ask questions and generally listen, [who are] not just waiting for a pause in the conversation. “
Street Culture: Choozle’s Culture Attracts a New CTO and a New Dialogue
Getting rid of job titles and helping people detach from job titles are two of the biggest challenges around refocusing a company on its culture and its values, CTO John Schnipkoweit says. At Choozle, the culture is focused around the product it is creating, and allowing that product to drive the company.
Adthena Giving Culture the Credit It Deserves
“It’s really important that [staff] understand how their work contributes to the company objective, rather than just being busy and doing things and not knowing whether it has an impact on the company goals and outcomes,” says the company’s CEO, Ian O’Rourke .
Street Culture: ‘OKRs’ and Omotenashi Lead the Culture at Button
OKRs – that’s “Objectives and Key Results” – are one of the drivers of culture at deep-linking software company Button. “OKRs are a major influencer to recruiting, internal interactions, how we onboard new employees, everything,” says Stephanie Mardell, Button’s head of people.
Street Culture: Life at Boxed Means “Do The Right Thing”
Wholesale ecommerce retailer Boxed is taking its position as team leader seriously. The company pays for its employees’ kids to go to college. It looked at the industry-wide “pink tax” and started a campaign against the higher prices. It even started contributing $20,000 to pay for employees’ weddings.
Street Culture: Female Leaders at Main Street Hub Highlight Group Dynamics and Diversity in Communication
At marketing automation and CRM company Main Street Hub, the product engineering team has grown from six people to 30 in three years. The entire company employs more than 500 people, so in the product, engineering, and design department, the leadership is proud of the diversity and success they have achieved.
Street Culture: Hooch Expansion Reveals Value in Multi-Function Employees
Hooch isn’t hiring right now, but they expect to ramp up technology and data positions in fall 2017. Dai says his secret to hiring is to be brutally honest about the challenges and struggles of working at startup.
Street Culture: Blind References Help Weed Out Drama at Zaius
“In the hiring process, we often use the terms ‘smart, hungry, and humble,’” says Zaius CEO Mark Gally. “This notion of being humble is really a critical component of culture. We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take our work extremely seriously.”
At Liftoff, a Classic Formula for Company Culture
It’s never too early to be intentional about establishing and promoting the key values you want your team to emulate, says Liftoff’s CEO Mark Ellis. It provides a set of criteria against which to assess candidates from a cultural fit perspective, as well as a rationale for promoting certain employee behaviors and discouraging others.
Street Culture: A New Way to Keep Score at CrowdOptic
“The argument is, build a large company to be insanely great and change the world, right?” says CEO Jon Fisher. “As we operationalize the financial part, the path to making a real contribution in the world can be formulaic.”
Street Culture: A Look at the Culture of a Team Within a Team at conichiwa
A spinoff company from a larger mothership might already have culture built in. At Conichiwa, a Berlin-based proximity agency and beacon company, that’s not quite what is happening.
Street Culture: Metrics for a Global Community
While some company founders sit down and write out their core values and identify what their company’s culture should be before they even find the people who will help them, others just go with their gut. For Pete Gombert, founder of local marketing company Balihoo, his gut feeling about culture has turned into a whole new company.
Street Culture: Taking Estimote’s ‘No Barriers’ Culture Literally
The company’s mission is to build a new operating system for the physical world, and to get there the team needs zero bullshit. Culture is far too important to leave to chance, says John Cieslik-Bridgen, Estimote’s VP of culture. But it’s also important to allow natural evolution.
Street Culture: Six Vertical Pivoting its Culture with its Company
Starting your own tech company often comes with a painful side effect, says Joshua Enders, managing partner of client success at digital commerce company Six Vertical: “It’s an absolute grind. It’s like getting punched in the stomach multiple times a day,” Enders says. “I’m speaking from experience.”
Street Culture: Balancing Structure and Exploration in Company Culture
Environment, talent, and process all encourage the growth of innovation, according to IT research firm CEB, which was recently acquired by Gartner. But there’s a balancing act that must take place between structure and exploration — especially for smaller companies on a fast upward growth curve.
Street Culture: Pointy Focusing on People and Product, Not Process
Dublin-based digital search platform startup Pointy is still at that point where the culture is just what it is, without special definitions or structure. “The number of people on our team now is small, almost painfully small,” says co-founder Mark Cummins. “There’s not a lot of structure. Well, there is structure, but there’s not a lot of process around it.”