Business
Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)
youtube.com/@ycrootaccess
24 Oct 2014 · Business
50 min watch → 85 sec
A company culture should be designed around mission-specific values, reinforced through daily behavior, and used to hire, fire, and make hard decisions. Airbnb and Zappos show how early values shape long-term endurance, brand, and team performance.
Company culture is everyday values and actions that guide decisions, trust, and limits in pursuit of a mission.
Strong culture is a long-term advantage. Airbnb designed it early, hired slowly, and built mission-specific values like "champion the mission."
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A practical culture test is simple. Values must help the company pursue its mission.
Values detached from the mission do not guide useful decisions.
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Mission-specific values beat generic values.
01
Zappos used "deliver wow through service."
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Zappos used "be humble."
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Generic words like honesty and teamwork are too broad.
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Useful core values take depth, not slogans.
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Zappos started with 37 candidate values.
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Zappos reduced them to about 10.
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Employees gave input.
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The process took a year.
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Culture must become a daily habit, like fitness or customer service.
Companies that treat culture as an occasional initiative drift out of shape.
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Patrick Lencioni's team-dysfunction pyramid fails in sequence.
01
Lack of trust blocks healthy conflict.
02
Lack of conflict blocks commitment.
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Lack of commitment weakens accountability.
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Weak accountability blocks results.
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11.08%
Return from 1997 to 2003 for Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For.
That was almost twice the stock-market returns of the S&P 500 and Russell 3000 shown.
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Airbnb's founders became the company's initial DNA in 2008.
They worked like a tightly aligned family and spent nearly all their time together.
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Founders are like parents, and the company is like a child.
Aligned founders create healthier culture. Dysfunctional founders create dysfunctional company behavior.
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"Belong anywhere."
Airbnb's enduring mission.
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Airbnb was not fundamentally about booking rooms. It was about helping people belong and come together.
That mission defined what the company was building.
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A 2012 London riots story showed Airbnb could create friendship, not just transactions.
Host Sebastian said 7 former guests checked on him before his own mother did.
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Airbnb hired for ability and values fit.
01
World-class ability was required.
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Separate core-values interviewers sat outside the candidate's function.
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Technical excellence could not override the culture decision.
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Brian Chesky personally interviewed Airbnb's first 300 employees.
He asked whether a candidate would still take the job with 10 years left to live.
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Airbnb rejected a Rocket Internet clone with 400 people and $90 million.
Airbnb had 40 employees and $7 million, but saw mercenary culture as the bigger risk.
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Culture and brand are two sides of the same coin.
Internal beliefs show up externally, and feature-only companies become commodity utilities.
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