Startup DNA

and how to keep it when you build your company

Pieter Kemps Amazon Web Services P_Kemps

Company Building

And yet…

Total  #  AirBnB  Guests  

9M  Up  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

# 3 Investor Pitch Deck

Biggest Challenge = Finding People

# 1 Customer Pitch Deck

# 2 Employee 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

f(innova3on)  =   (mechanisms * culture) (org  *  arch)  

customer obsession

ownership

invent and simplify

right, a lot hire and develop the best

insist on highest standards

think big bias 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

www.dilbert.com

dive deep Leaders 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

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 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

Thank You

P_Kemps