Company building: Keeping your startup DNA when you grow your business

Keeping Your

Zubin Chagpar, Venture Capital Business

Development, Amazon Web Services

@phylosopher

Company Building

And yet…

Total # AirBnB Guests

9MUp by over 5 million since the beginning of the 2013

Brian

“What is the single most important piece of advice

for us?”

Peter“Don’t ‘mess’ up the Culture”

https://medium.com/working-life/597cde9ee9d4

The culture is what creates the

foundation for all future innovation. If

you break the culture, you break the

machine that creates your products.”Brian Chesky, Founder

https://medium.com/working-life/597cde9ee9d4

“The product is the product.

The culture is the next hundred products””

Phil Libin, CEO

www.fastcompany.com/3012870/dialed/evernotes-quest-to-become-a-100-year-old-startup

How do you keep Startup DNA??

How do you build it into your Culture as

you scale your business??

When you get started

Biggest Challenge = Finding People

# 1 Customer Pitch Deck

# 2 Employee Pitch Deck

# 3 Investor Pitch Deck

Existing Values

“Adventure”

“Living in the Stretch”

Culture

as an Asset

ABH‘Always Be Hiring’

http://erickschonfeld.com/2013/04/23/vinod-khosla-demo-mobile-2/

"A company becomes the people it hires, not what it plans."

Vinod Khosla

When you are scaling

“Good culture creates an environment where people can do their best work”

Mike Curtis, VP Engineering, Airbnb

http://nerds.airbnb.com/engineering-culture-airbnb/

Organization

Structured teams, fluid responsibilities

Process

Example: Code Review Process

When you are at scale

customer obsession

ownership

invent and simplify

right, a lot

hire and develop the best

insist on highest standards

think bigbias for action

frugality

vocally self critical

earn trust

dive deep

have backbone; disagree & commit

deliver results

amazon leadership principles

OwnershipLeaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice

long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the

entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say

“that’s not my job."

DevOps

two pizzas teams

www.dilbert.com

dive deepLeaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, and audit

frequently. No task is beneath them.

Amazon has a very metrics-driven culture

Weekly ops metric meetings

a scorecard for each service team

a graph for every metric that customers care about

each graph has a line…fitness function

Correction of Error (COE) process

“We noticed that you

experienced poor

video playback. We’re

sorry for the

inconvenience and

have issued you a

refund for $3.99”

http://consumerist.com/2013/05/02/amazon-notices-our-streaming-video-was-glitchy-proactively-issues-refund/

customer obsessionLeaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work

vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay

attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Press release to capture the customer

perspective1

FAQ to answer any questions a customer

might have2

Start finding the right ‘primitives’3

Launch, then iterate fast & often4

Rate of Experimentation

11.6s

Average time

between

deployments

(weekday)

1,079

Max number of

deployments in a

single hour

(or approx every

3 seconds)

30,000

Max number of

instances

simultaneously

receiving a

deployment

Speed of Deployments at Amazon.com

May 2011

Culture

Mechanisms

Organization

Architecture

Startup DNA

Thank You

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