company building - amazon s3...company building keeping your startup dna when you grow your business...

Company Building Keeping your startup DNA when you grow your

business

Jonathon Southam, Business Development

Startup Community, AWS

George Berkowski, CEO IceCream

Company Building

And yet…

Total # AirBnB Guests

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?

# 3 Investor Pitch Deck

Biggest Challenge = Finding People

# 1 Customer Pitch Deck

# 2 Employee Pitch Deck

ABH‘Always Be Hiring’

Location Name

A must read for anyone who wants to start a mobile app business’ RICCARDO

ZACCONI, FOUNDER AND CEO KING DIGITAL (MAKER OF CANDY CRUSH SAGA)

‘A must read for anyone

who wants to start a

mobile app business’

- CEO King Digital

(maker of Candy Crush Saga)

‘A compulsively

readable business book’

- Jeffrey Rayport

(Harvard Business School)

Location Name

A must read for anyone who wants to start a mobile app business’ RICCARDO

ZACCONI, FOUNDER AND CEO KING DIGITAL (MAKER OF CANDY CRUSH SAGA)

givemeicecream.com

"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

f(innovation) =

(mechanisms * culture)

(org * arch)

customer obsession

ownership

invent and simplify

are 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

Ownership

Leaders 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 pizza teams

dive deep

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

frequently. No task is beneath them.

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

Amazon has a very metrics-driven culture

But then TJ gets an unexpected

e-mail from Amazon...

“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 obsession

Leaders 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

perspective#1

FAQ to answer any questions a customer

might have#2

Press release to capture the customer

perspective#1

FAQ to answer any questions a customer

might have#2

Start finding the right ‘primitives’#3

Launch, then iterate fast & often#4

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

Company Building Keeping your startup DNA when you grow your business

George Berkowski, CEO IceCream

(Former Head of Product, Hailo)

Location Name

Scaling Agile @ HAILO to 18 Cities

jsoutham@amazon.co.uk

George@ice.cm