Advice To "People Leaders" At Early Stage Startups

Everything from defining your mission, vision, and values to rhythm of business, remote vs in-person, and offsite planning!

Recently, I was asked to contribute to a guide that will soon be shared with graduates of YCombinator about how to grow their companies after demo day. Alongside leaders of other companies in the “tech stack” for any remote or hybrid startup, I provided some advice on building great company culture.

Below, I’ve shared that advice with you (a first-hand, sneak-peak as a thank you for being a subscriber to The Offsite Blog!

Please share, and when you’re ready, get started on your next team retreat at offsite.com. It’s free to make an account.

And the excerpt begins…

At the Seed stage (and arguably throughout your company’s existence), your “people” are one of the biggest differentiating factors between companies who make it, and those who don’t. 

Most investors are betting on you, as a founder, in the early stages of funding. In turn, you are betting on your first 5 to 500 hires to help you find product-market fit, scale up, and become a category-defining company. 

While we don’t claim to be experts on all things company culture, here are some “pro-tips” to consider while building your team. 

Define Your Company’s Mission, Vision, and Values

Your company’s mission is ultimately what you’re selling to your team. Why should they join you on your startup journey? Are you planning to make humans a multi-planetary species like SpaceX, save the planet like Patagonia, or spread ideas like TED? 

Your mission statement is an opportunity to “rally the troops” whereas your Vision is the initial phases of this plan (ie the “How”). For Tesla, the Vision was to create an expensive car, then a mid-level car, and finally an affordable vehicle everyone could afford. For Amazon, the Vision was to sell books online, then expand into other categories. 

Your Values are the habits, principles, and guidelines by which you execute your vision. For every company, this will be different. Less is more with company values, and they should be practical, so that everyone knows how to act when you’re not looking. Famously, Meta had an old value of “move fast and break things” which helped employees prioritize speed over perfection. 

Remote vs Hybrid vs In-Person: What’s Best For You? 

Most companies are now faced with the decision of going office-first, remote-first, or hybrid. Perhaps for the first time, this decision will have unending ramifications on your company culture and should be made intentionally. 

Many “hardcore” companies will choose to be office-first, which can be good for teams located in major cities, with strong recruiting abilities and a culture where everyone is expected to work 6 days a week, 80+ hours a week from founders to interns. 

Most companies would actually benefit from being remote-first, to be able to hire from anywhere, offer a better quality of life to employees that is more sustainable, and force more intentional culture-building around mission, vision, and values, process documentation, communication, and more. Arguably, employees can also be more productive working as they please, and assuming you trust them to get their work (which, if you don’t trust them, don’t hire them in the first place!). 

The worst is hybrid, because you get few of the benefits of being remote-first while paying for an office that isn’t being maximized. Pick one extreme (in-person or remote-first) and build your company from there. 

Rhythm of Business 

It pays to establish rituals around goal-setting, reporting to investors, and investing in your company’s culture. Having daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly “rhythms” keeps the business moving forward, and you can start with the basics before adding in other motions.

Daily: Standups

In-office, this can be a literal “standing” meeting, where everyone shares what they accomplished yesterday, what they are working on today, and what’s blocking them or where they need help. As a remote-first company, you can use a tool like Geekbot (which integrates with Slack) to facilitate this exercise. 

Weekly: All-Hands Meeting, 1-on-1s, and Company Scorecard

As a founder/CEO, every Monday I meet with my direct reports and encourage them to do the same with their teams. These “1-on-1s” are about them, not me, and give my direct reports the space to share where they need help, what’s going well, and what potential landmines we’re moving towards. 

We also have a 30 minute “All-Hands” meeting where leadership briefly runs through major company updates by department. We also start each meeting with a quick share of gratitude and a fun icebreaker so we can get to know each other a little better each week. Finally, we share the top 5-10 metrics being tracked so we know if we’re achieving our OKRs or not. By the way, much of our Rhythm of Business comes from Traction. 

Quarterly: OKRs, Board Meetings, and Offsites

Each quarter, we pick 2-4 company-wide “objectives” as well as 3-5 “key results” that would indicate whether we accomplish our objective or not. If we want to increase margins, for example, then one key result might be to raise prices by 10%. Another might be to reduce our Cost of Goods Sold by 20%. We use our key results to build the company scorecard and discuss OKRs each week. 

We also plan offsites quarterly with our leadership team and twice per year with the entire company. Depending on whether you are remote-first or office-first, and how large your team is, will dictate how often you should plan team retreats. However, at minimum your leadership team should meet for 2 full days each quarter, outside of the office and at a destination where space is cleared for strategic planning.

If you are remote-first, you should also plan 2-4 all-company offsites per year to increase employee engagement, retention, and alignment by including them in strategic planning efforts, reiterating company Mission, Vision, and Values, and celebrating your success along the way. 

Depending on your stage, you may have quarterly board meetings too. Even if you don’t have a formal board, establishing the habit of holding board meetings regularly is great practice for the future. Joe Lonsdale has a great “1 Hour Board Meeting” framework that includes a deck at the bottom. 

In Conclusion:

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