Is Culture a Luxury?

Scene: TechCrunch Early Stage conference. Hundreds of startup enthusiasts, investors, service providers, and students milling about a converted warehouse. Espresso bars scattered around serving handmade lavender lattes. Large standing tables on the main floor where nerds are furiously tapping away at email, ignoring the conference around them. In the parking lot, mostly men in sport jackets and t-shirts are waving their hands while making business calls.

TechCrunch Early Stage was a one-day conference targeting early stage founders. Almost all of the formal talks and panels were around finding venture capital financing. A small vendor hall of startup service providers (imagine lawyers, accountants, and outsourced development shops) handed out swag and collected business cards.

The most interesting thing to me was an unconference area inside the conference. An unconference is when any attendee can propose a topic and other attendees come and talk about it. Unconference events are scary for conference organizers because you cede control of what is usually a super-controlled event.

At a typical conference, organizers can choose who speaks, about what, for how long, in which room, for how many attendees...etc.

At an unconference, attendees decide what matters most. It's a sneaky way of discovering what's top of mind for that audience by Tom Sawyer-ing conference content.

And at TechCrunch Early Stage, if the unconference is a straw poll of founder passion topics, then culture, leadership skills, and teambuilding are not hot topics. Topics that were more prevalent than culture were fundraising, Go-To-Market topics, and "let me show you my app."

I get it.

It can seem luxurious to talk about team dynamics when you don't know how you'll make payroll in three months. A topic like psychological safety seems like something that's a nice to have when measured up against OH MY GOD I NEED MORE LEADS.

(If you've been a long-time subscriber to this newsletter, you know what I'm about to say)

Culture is not a nice to have.

I've seen this (often unconscious) decision to spend more attention on business tactics than how to manage yourself and your team so many times. The topic "How we work" tends to become a tacit decision to prioritize everything else but culture.

I see it as the difference between buying a gym membership and hiring a personal trainer:

• Buying a gym membership is relatively inexpensive, you have full freedom of what you can do, and you always say you're going to use it more than you really do.
• Hiring a personal trainer is more expensive, you follow along with their recommendations, and you are far more likely to get the results you want.

I fundamentally believe that a team culture where people can express themselves without fear is a pre-requisite to making tons of money, not an outcome of it.

And before you rush to the defense of scrappy startups trying to keep the lights on, I can acknowledge that there's a balance here. If you have a nuanced company mission statement but don't have any customers, then good luck making payroll. However, if the TechCrunch Early Stage unconference topic list is in any way representative of what's keeping founders up late at night, then it's not mission statements.

The So What here is that if you agree with me that effectively managing yourself and your team is just-as-or-more-important than having a dope social media brand or a better pitch deck, then how are you keeping this topic top of mind in your business?

Do you talk about team culture in your weekly team meetings?

Do you do daily reflections on your day and plan how to make better decisions tomorrow?

Do you have time set aside every month to meaningfully connect and talk about something other than your quarterly KPIs?

I'd love to hear what you do to elevate your organization's culture. Whether you're a solopreneur, a cog in a giant corporate machine, a leader at a small business, or trying to find that next dream job, I'd like to see what works for other people.

➡️ Reply back to this email and share your thoughts, "How do you invest in your organization's internal culture?"

A TL;DR from the CRO

I skip conference panels so I can schmooze at the bar/dog park.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

New Blog Post: Empowering Leaders to Transform Your Business

Changing one simple thing in a weekly meeting transformed this business. Could it do the same for yours? Read how...​

I'm still doing the 30-Day Question Challenge and got exhausted hearing my own voice.

(lol, u probably get exhausted from hearing my voice, too)

Being a curious kid, I tried to find a way to cheat my way through my own self-reflection by using AI to do the heavy lifting for me.

I was so impressed by the results that I shot a short explainer video on how I used AI to self-reflect for me.​

If you needed a startup idea, you can steal that workflow. Go ahead, productize AI-powered self-reflection. You'll fit right in with every other startup at TechCrunch Early Stage.

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Keep talking to yourself,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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​PS. The bleeding edge of short-form cinema are SNL digital shorts. Now showing, Papyrus 2.​