Culture

Culture has played a big role in Bala's guidance as the class mentor.  In a way he has taught us that the culture is the secret sauce of a startup. It has given me many reasons to think of culture. What is a companies culture? After reading many posts on the web such as the post of Corey McAcenney on wired.com on startup culture, Candida Brush on Forbes.com and books like Zero to One I have come to the conclusion that saying a company has some culture of X is not the perfect expression but a much common one. I prefer to refer to the learning from the book Zero to One that no company has no culture, a company or a team is a culture. The ritual we use to describe our culture is what we as a team communicate about what we want to be, what we want the company to be.

Bala has managed to get us to think about how to start a startup, we are all really interested in this subject and we absolutely love getting wisdom from people out there who are willing to share with us their experience and philosophy regarding things related to starting a startup. And what would describe the culture of Bala's class? I think all his planning and research has been a part of the ritual he wanted to be the class culture. The class has a culture of shared interest in learning how to start a startup, getting wisdom from the ones who have done a startup and so on.

Gunnar Hólmsteinn, the COO of QuizUp visited us to share with us his wisdom on culture. And what I noticed was that this guy is not the academic type who gives us some definition on the white screen about culture, allow me to to skip to the wikipedia description: "the behaviour of humans within an organization and the meaning that people attach to those behaviours".
He's the kind of guy we need, because we could all seek the academic expression of culture on the web by our self. He's man with culture-creation in his fingertips. Some people have that ability to make a party a good party and I'm sure that he's that type. 

So there he was to tell us about culture and he just told us .. the best way for me to explain to you guys what culture .... is by telling you about my job....

And why did he do it this way? Why did he express culture on his first actions as the COO of QuizUp? It's because when we outline overall goals of startups we are motivating our culture.
When we show respect for the people we work with we are creating a culture of respect.

Every story an ex-employee or current employee can say about atmosphere in the company is that persons version of the company's culture. Because culture is how we behave with our colleges. And having given that a thought I understand the importance of the company's culture rituals and what the company does to get these values and the habits it powers to be a expression of the companies culture. Because in the end we want all memories to be pleasant.

The only question left is: what is a good company? What is a good culture? I think no company can be good company unless it has a good culture and because of that it's safe to say that the culture is one of the company's most important flavors.