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How to Nurture a Positive Startup Culture 🍎
Stephen Moore
December 05, 2023
Presented by
Welcome to EH Weekly, the new newsletter from the team behind Medium’s biggest entrepreneur-focused publication.
You can look forward to insightful lessons and practical takeaways delivered to your inbox every week.
In this week’s edition, we discuss:
How to get rid of the bad apples damaging your startup’s culture
The success signals VCs look for in the founders they fund
How to nurture a positive startup culture 🍎
“If a superb culture is the pixie dust of entrepreneurship, the rotten apple employee is the poison. It is not so much a case of Honey I Blew up the Kids, but Honey, I Blew up the Business.”
If you spot a rotten apple ruining your startup’s culture, what can you do about it? You can’t bury your head in the sand and hope it will disappear. You need to take action. Jan Cavelle has some advice:
Stop them at recruitment — The only chance you have is a deep dive into the person’s background. The internal terrorists will have left a trail of destruction elsewhere. It might be broken business partnerships or short-term employment with other companies. We entrepreneurs are fond of going with our gut; this is a time to ignore it.
Cut short the agony — It may seem like a horrendous prospect to pay a large sum to a brand-new hire, but many companies have come to believe it is far cheaper to do this than to keep someone who may damage their culture. If there is a skill problem or slight attitude problem, that can be fixed. But right from day one, if you sense any jarring note with your culture and changes in the atmosphere, get rid, fast.
A later-day purge — The longer you leave it, the more acolytes they will have. Those devotees will never see the truth of what is going on, the damage that is being done. To purge the true internal terrorist later, you need time, money, and energy. It could require completely rebuilding your team from scratch if it has been allowed to fester too long.
👉️ Read more about cleaning up your culture: Rotten Apples: Fresh Solutions
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The success signals VCs look for in founders 💵
“I was always so sure I was on the cusp of having a billion-dollar gold mine, they were equally sure I wasn’t, but they were always right and I was always wrong. How?”
The answer turns out to be pattern recognition. Aaron Dinin is now a couple of decades into his entrepreneurial journey and has met thousands of entrepreneurs. He’s learned that identifying the founders who seem like good investments is surprisingly easy.
Here, Dinin lists the three most important success signals venture capitalists are looking for in the founders they ultimately fund:
Signal #1: Significant accomplishment as a teenager — Nobody makes someone build a startup. Everything you do as an entrepreneur you do because you want to do it. Investors know this, so they look for founders who are self-motivated enough to pursue big, difficult goals on their own.
Signal #2: Obsessed with a specific problem — Lots of entrepreneurs are building startups because they like the idea of being entrepreneurs and then go searching for a problem. However, founders who are clearly worth funding are founders who don’t care about being entrepreneurs. Instead, they’re obsessed with solving specific problems.
Signal #3: Disinterested in most “normal” things — The founders who are most likely to succeed tend to naturally prioritize their startups above other things. For them, doing so isn’t some sort of punishment or difficult challenge. The truth is, they’d rather be working on their startups, and that’s a big part of what makes them more likely to succeed.