Business of Software 2014: Can you build a business without compromising your principles?

Can you build a business without compromising

your principles?

Joel Gascoigne Co-founder and CEO, Buffer

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markybon/1726278203/

About me

What I’ll talk about

• Tried to think, what are the most unusual aspects of the culture at Buffer compared to the way I understand other companies operate.

What I’ll talk about

• Firstly, I want to talk about our journey with transparency.

Transparency

Values

Distributed Team

The Product

• 1.7m users

• 165k monthly active

• 28k paying customers

• $4.25m annual recurring revenue ($355k MRR)

• 5.5% monthly revenue churn

• My salary: $175k and whole team salaries public

http://www.flickr.com/photos/betsyweber/6719452305/

Culture Deck - buff.ly/buffervalues

Open Salaries - buff.ly/openpay

Transparent Email

More Details - buff.ly/emailtransparency

What I’ll talk about

• Firstly, I want to talk about our journey with transparency.

Why be Transparent?

Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork

“On several occasions I have taken our internal profit calculations out of one of the director’s briefcases and given the customer a copy. Here is what we plan to make as a profit, I’ve said. Do you think it’s too much? What do you suggest? What should we do?”

- Ricardo Semler

“if you want people to make the same decisions that you would make, but in a more scalable way, you have to give them the same information you have”

- Keith Rabois

“I kept saying that our values were not responsible for the run-up in our share price and should not be blamed for any down-turns in the future.”

- Dennis Bakke

Values

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” - Jim Rohn

“Every company has a culture. The only question is whether or not you decide what it is.” - Jason Cohen

Culture Deck - buff.ly/buffervalues

Always choose positivity and happiness

You always approach things in a positivity and optimistic way.

You are deliberate about giving genuine appreciation

You never complain

Be a “no ego” doer

You don’t attach your personal self to ideas.

You let others have your best ideas.

You approach ideas thinking “what can we do right now?”

Listen first, then listen more

You seek first to understand, then to be understood

You take the approach that everything is a hypothesis and you could be wrong

You are suggestive rather than instructive, replacing phrases such as ‘certainly’, ‘undoubtedly’, etc. with ‘perhaps’, ‘I think’, ‘my intuition right now’

“first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it.”

- Jim Collins

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Two questions exercise

“would you hire the person again?”

“if the person came to tell you that he or she is leaving to pursue an exciting new opportunity, would you feel terribly disappointed or secretly relieved?”

- Jim Collins

If you want to have a great team and a great company, you’re inevitably going

to fire people at times.

“For every minute you allow a person to continue holding a seat when you know that person will not make it in the end, you’re stealing a portion of his life, time that he could spend finding a better place where he could flourish.”

- Jim Collins

Distributed Team

“There are no advantages for people who come into the office, no disadvantages to

staying home to get your work done.”

- Jason Zimdars

Being a distributed team• It allows us to provide the best possible customer

service

• People can choose their most ideal working environment (home, office, coffee shop)

• It feels like the future

• We’re super productive, and can work 24/7

“Every company has a culture. The only question is whether or not you decide what it is.” - Jason Cohen

Thanks!@joelgascoigne