Molly Graham: evaluation

Transcript context

…So speaking of high performers, you've worked with many very high performing founder-CEOs. He worked really closely with Zuck, with Cheryl Sandberg, with Larry and Sergei at Google, with Brett Taylor, who I just... Just like you trying to read his resume, it takes three lines of things he's done over the course of his career. And so I just want to spend a little time on what are some things you've learned, maybe a few things you've learned from them, that group that you find yourself sharing with other people most. That list is very long, but I'll give you a couple. The first one that I think is kind of counterintuitive is... So I said I worked at Facebook. I worked on culture, which is one of those words that doesn't really mean anything. So I define it as the way we do things around here. And I thought my job was to shape the culture. I thought it was to push the culture. And the most humbling lesson I learned is 80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Facebook is Mark. Google is Larry and Sergei. Google, when I was there, it felt like a university. It's where ideas are more important in a lot of ways than what's shipped. And there's a campus and they basically wanted people to live there when I was there. It was designed to basically be a two PhD students' paradise. Facebook felt like a 19-year-old hacker's dorm room when I was there. And it was shipping above all and all else. And it seeped with Mark's DNA. And I spent ages trying to create various changes inside the company or trying to push a point. And Mark would say literally one thing in an all hands, and it was like somebody threw a boulder into the pond. So our job as operators or as leaders around founders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating and to help extend it. My version of founder mode, which I know you've spent some time on on this podcast is your job is to build a company that would make a decision the way the founder would when they're not in the room. That is the work of building a company around a founder, but your job is not to shape culture. That is mostly defined by the literal personality strengths and weaknesses of the person at the top. And that's been true of Mark and it's been true of Brett. Everywhere I go, that's who it is. You don't need a consulting firm to tell you, just go do a personality diagnosis on your founder. And the weaknesses thing is real. I've seen and watched friends try to shape a set of values at a company and it just doesn't match who the founder is. You say, "Move fast and break things," or whatever your version of that is. And your founder loves ambiguity and is perfectly happy with not making decisions. All that leads to is cultural dissonance. It leads to people being like, "Wait, what? I thought we said we care about moving fast and making aggressive decisions and it turns out..." So being really careful about what you say, because what people actually feel when it comes to culture is what you do and how you act every day. You can never write anything down and you will still have a culture. It will be created through the actions and the decisions that you make and that your founder makes. So that would be a huge one. Let me spend a little more time on this because this is so good. So all this advice on culture and it feels so true based on everything I've seen. So tip one there is just you can't really change the culture. Maybe there's a little bit on the edges you could adjust. It will come down and trickle down from the founder, CEO probably mostly, but just the founders in general.…

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