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Hello, hello. Welcome back to Build Mode. I'm your host, Isabelle Johannes, and today I'm here with our producer, Maggie Nye. And Maggie, I have a question for you. After digging through all of the footage of Build Mode over the seasons, what do you think is something that almost every guest has mentioned? That is going to have to be company culture. I uh it's something that it's I've really learned going through all of these episodes. Founders really need to think about early. It is something that sets the tone, sets the vibe as you grow your team. And it's something that can't really be taken back. Once you have a culture set in place, that tends to only grow. So yeah, today we're going to be sharing some
clips from episodes all about how different leaders have thought about setting the tone of their team, intentionally building their culture, maybe a couple things they wish they had done differently. To help us settle into this topic of company culture, we're going to hear a clip from Ian Schmidt, a consultant at Trimergence, which is an agency that helps founders and leaders and teams develop frameworks to work most effectively together. Here, Ian is discussing why founders should invest in a leadership coach early on because when it comes to culture and setting the vibes of a workplace, you really can't ever hit the reset button. I always say scale yourself so you can scale the company, right? You need to be on your
own exponential growth curve. And we hear this all the time. Oh, I don't have time right now. I'm going to kick the can down the road or there's nothing's broken, right? And what I would say is the more you invest now with the power of compounding, you're going to save an enormous amount of time. I've seen it happen time and time again. And if you wait, you're it's actually gonna end up messier and taking more time to clean up and um reduce the noise. So that's one piece. The other piece is what we found is super powerful is if you have a set of tools that are very simple that are potent both for that self-awareness journey, for navigating the relational dynamic, and to sort of map and manage your internal state, that
state of being. when we get triggered. If you have that integrated and then you deploy it for yourselves and in the company as a platform if you will with kind of a standard methodology that relationship and OS upgrade process can be super efficient and really effective and what's great is what works at with two founders then that platform scales to 20 to 200 headcount to 2,00 and we've seen it beyond You know, we've had clients for 20 years with the same platform to make it super efficient and effective and I guarantee you it's going to save time. It's going to help you get better results faster. It's going to unlock all kinds of energy and it's going to be a lot more fun and fulfilling.
I love this idea of, you know, when you do the work on yourself, it spreads to the next person. And I think that's important in just non-b businessiness context as well. But especially when you're the founder of this company, the leader, the face, the figurehead of this company, the work you do on yourself will then spread to your co-founders, to your teammates, to your customers. Um, and really to sort of take that seriously. Well, and at the end of the day, your culture is how you interact and how your feet move. It's not the um the values that you put on the wall or what have you. Everybody's watching the founder and the core team.
Like that's the culture, right? And so yeah, you want it to be as clean and that noise reduction algorithm and you're you're really juicing up what you're all here to do. Scaling startups and growth stage companies can find themselves in a precarious position. A culture is easy to establish and maintain when you have a team of five. But when that team grows to 10, 20, 100 people, a founder can't be everywhere. So having trusted people in leadership positions is crucial. Next, you're going to hear from Hala Jawwani, the co-founder and CEO of Rivio, an enterprise AI service that automates corporate purchasing and contract management. And she gets into
how they think about leadership hires when it comes to maintaining their company culture. Because I also think that the future of teams are small and more generalist in term of at the end of the day right now each person for us in in a nonAI world would have been the equivalent of three hires and I see this number not exponentially growing but every year we're seeing the capacity of each person growing so it really matter who are you bringing in are they adding to the culture are they able to grow later on into their own um leader in that space. Hiring is hard, but firing is much harder. In the next clip, you'll hear from Aal Yogv, the CEO of Enjuna, which is a data security company for Agentic AI. And he gets into the one word he
believes actually matters when it comes to company culture and how he's managed to maintain relatively high morale at his company even after conducting multiple layoffs. When everything is kind of up and to the right and everybody's happy, you can get away with culture who it's not great maybe. But when things are bad, you know, if you have a good culture, that what keeps people around, what keeps you together as a team. Well, so what how did you sort of build that culture? Because you also mentioned that, you know, the second sort of round of layoffs was more difficult, right? And to kind of keep morale up during these difficult times. What was
your train of thought? Yeah, I can talk about just sort of culture in general and kind of how I think about culture. I think one of the kind of benefits or one of the things that I kind of had was that I've seen a bunch of people kind of coming right out of college and you know starting companies and it's great right and some of them are the most successful you know entrepreneurs on the planet. Some of them yeah some of them. Yeah. Always survival bias, right? You know the ones that are and you never hear the ones that are not. But the kind of the downside of that is if you've never worked at a company and you never kind of
experienced different company cultures and what you like, what you don't like, what you know works better with teams. So I think kind of one of the benefits that I had was that I worked at a bunch of companies before starting this company. So I kind of saw I saw a bunch of company culture and for each one I kind of took this is things that I like the things that I don't like. this is something I'll never want to do of you know of a company you know and to me and it's funny one of the things that I've kind of saw very early on is people kind of have these kind of 10 you know these are culture 10 things on the wall and it's none of it matter it's not about what you write on the wall it's
not about what you say it's it's what you do right and basically a culture is basically there's a thousand little decisions that you make every day and those are the ones that actually define the culture it doesn't matter what you have on the wall like no nobody cares about it nobody listens to like it's and it almost becomes is like a almost like a if what you do is different than what you say, it almost becomes like an internal joke within the company though. They say like it's it's very hard to get away from that. And what I like and it's funny I kind of I heard um Jason Wong the founder of Zoom talk about this and he kind of thought talked about it the exact same
way that I would think about this which I loved. I actually took it to my company and he said he has only one word when it comes to culture and that's care that you know I care about my employees. I care, you know, we care about our customers. We care about, you know, every our vendors. We and I love that and that's kind of what I took for our company culture and we kind of use care as the kind of the word for the company culture. And to me, just the thousand little things I can give some examples, but like every decision that you make, right? It's from even people that you not necessarily that, you know, you're going to hire, right? You're you're interviewing somebody if you
decide not to move forward is letting them know that you're not just sort of, you know, ghosting them and disappearing, right? That's that's part of it. how you know part ways with somebody you know how do you talk about people like I've been in companies where once somebody leaves or they're let go people start kind of talking you know saying bad things about them and I didn't like that right you know it's even if they weren't great there's really no point bringing it up but especially people that were great I knew they were great and they decided to leave but then you know within these companies they started you know kind of you know badmouthing them because they've left and I hated that uh so
it's that and obviously everybody in the company obviously everybody you know as you part ways as part of a riff how do you kind of make sure that you give people the as much support as you can as you do that how do you communicate this how do you make sure it's communicated it's not because you know maybe some roles are not needed anymore but it's not because these people haven't done their job right there's a bunch of things that you can do to kind of make the transition easier is clearly a very compassionate leader so we're going to continue on with another deeply caring founder Leah Sullivan formerly of Task Rabbit and who more recently started her own fund, President VC. So, in this next clip, she
lays out when, how, and most importantly why building a diverse team should be something that is top of mind for every founder. I do want to talk a little bit about just generally like your advice for early stage founders building diverse teams, right? How much of a priority should it be and how should they go about doing it from day one? I feel like often times it's sort of like the company has scaled and it's an afterthought. Now we should be diverse. But really from day one, yeah, you can't save it till later because it'll never happen. You can't. And why is that? Well, because it's it's easier to swim in the flow of the river, right? It's like it's easier just to take say you're hiring, you know,
scaling up your engineering team. You have 20 resumes that come in. and you're like, "Oh, this person looks good. This guy looks good. This guy looks good." Like, boom, your team is filled. That's the easy path. Okay. The hard path is saying, "I've got to fill 10 positions on my team, and for every position, I want to see two female candidates." For every position. For every one position that I'm seeing a male resume, I want to see two females. That takes longer. But if you do that from the beginning and we did that at TaskRabbit from the beginning and our networks were different too, right? We
knew people that you know look different and thought differently and so that helps too. If your founding team is diverse that already gives you an edge and so but if you do that from the beginning then it becomes easier because the culture that's built, the team that's built, the network that you've built as a company is more diverse and it feeds itself. It becomes an ecosystem. It's it's too late if you wait until you've scaled and it's at the end. Yeah. No, I agree and I'm you know I'm I'm curious if women founders take more put more attention on building diverse teams just off, you know, almost instinctively, right? Like I see the value clearly in having a diverse team.
Totally rather than it being a box I need to check. Yes. But in turn, you know, women founded companies are often more successful in many ways, right? And I can't help but thinking those two go hand in hand. But I'm curious on your take, why do we think that, you know, women founded companies are so successful? Yeah, I mean it's true. And the numbers back it up, too. There's data that shows that, you know, more diverse teams, founding teams are more profitable. They build more profitable businesses. And so, you know, if as an investor you want to invest in a higher return, more profitable business, you should be investing in more diverse founding teams as well. And then if you're an LP that wants to invest in a fund, that wants to
see a high ROI on your fund returns, you should be asking your general partner fund managers how they think about diversity and investing. Like it flows all the way up and down the chain, right? I think the other component is that, you know, we as women and I think underrepresented groups as well, we're so used to kind of like fighting our way through life and fighting our way through things. And you know, you get to a point, at least I feel this way, where you've had success, you've, you know, completed the marathon, you've like reached that goal, and then what do you do? Well, you want to bring others along. you know, I mean, I almost feel this like it's not almost I feel this
obligation to bring others along, right? And so for me, it's not just about investing out of a fund and great. It's like if I'm looking at it through my lens, then I'll probably invest, you know, I'm twice as likely to invest in a female founder, then, you know, my partner might be great. But it's like on top of that there is an obligation to change the system because I've lived through the system right and I think you know anytime a female founder has had success has lived through the system there is that drive too to be like wow that really needs to change we should change that we've talked a lot about what founders can do early on to establish the company culture they want
but what about the future we had Jasper Carmichael Jack from Artisan on to discuss us how AI can impact the way teams work. Yeah, I think culture is one of the most difficult things in a company because it defines whether people enjoy work, whether people want to work, how they work, the style of working. It really defines the success of a company. Like do you have a culture that people are happy in, that people want to work a lot in, and that people are being productive in and not doing fake unnecessary work. Um, and it's something that we've learned a lot about over the past couple years. I
don't think there's any good answer. It's just like a constant iteration process. One thing is that your company will always have your worst traits. So you need to try and minimize your worst traits. Like if you are late to meetings, everyone else is going to be late to meetings cuz you are. Um so that's one thing you need to be really careful with. And they won't have your best traits. Like they the best traits. You still need to you can't tell people what to do. You need to tell people why they need to do it. So like you can't say this needs to be done immediately like we need to do this because we have this outcome that we're trying to
achieve and guide people rather than push people. Um Yeah. So like parenting almost as they say that as I do. Yeah. Well, speaking of company culture, so I'm curious when you are working with your customers, how does having an AI agent on a team impact culture? I think it's interest. I think we're in such early stages of AI employees and of AI agents that it's it's on the spectrum of having a software product and an AI employee. We're like here right now. Like we're not here yet. It doesn't actually feel like having a full colleague yet. I think we're going to get like here in the next year or so and then maybe here in next like 3 or 4 years, but right now it's not at the point where it feels like you're
actually interacting with another human on a team. Some people can feel threatened cuz they're like, "Oh, what is this AI that's coming and doing my things?" But most people feel empowered and they're excited to have this tool that can do all this work that they hated doing before. Um, but I think as we move further down the spectrum, further down the scale and we get closer and closer to having like a true human like AI employee, it will be a completely different interaction because you'll be messaging them on Slack, you'll be speaking to them on video calls, they'll be talking in the all hands, they'll be asking you questions and seeking information from you.
And that's what we're getting closer to, which I think is exciting and scary. All right. Well, on that exciting and scary note, we're going to wrap up this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Build Mode wherever you listen, write us a review, catch us on YouTube, leave us a comment, share us with your friends, your family, your followers even. And of course, take it easy until we see you right back here next time. Build Mode is a TechCrunch podcast. Each episode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye and hosted by me, Isabelle Johannes.
Our art and design is also by Maggie Nye. A big thanks to Morgan Little who leads our audience development, the Foundry and Cheddar video teams, and most of all to you, the builders, and everyone else in the wider startup community. We'll see you back here next time.
