Startups usually get attention when they raise significant capital—but the soft skills side of startup culture deserves more attention. After all, leadership, self-discipline and determination are also essential for growth.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy understands the value of preserving a startup culture, even within a multi-trillion-dollar organization, and expressed its importance in his latest Amazon shareholder letter: “We strive to operate like the world’s largest startup.”
In his letter, he lays out seven points describing what this statement means and shares his vision for Amazon to recapture its speed of growth, eliminate bureaucracy, hire more owners and be scrappy—elements that startups possess.
Jassy’s desire to resurrect startup culture is an example that other businesses can follow to create success. Here’s what startup culture is, how to maintain it and why recapturing that type of energy can generate exponential growth.
Startup culture explained
A startup culture captures the environment, focus and strategies of the early days of growing a business.
Startups tend to implement strategies faster, and because they have fewer employees, there’s less red tape and more individual attention for team members. The startup phase is when you can afford to take more risks, experience failure and learn from your mistakes.
Dan Nicholson, CEO of Nth Degree CPAs, says that it’s important to define what it means to have a startup culture. “I… grew up in Seattle, so I’ve been surrounded by Amazonians and seen it build up from Bezos’ garage to where it is today,” he says. “I think when you talk about startup culture, it’s about embracing failure, it’s about ongoing learning, and it’s about innovation.
“When you lose that, when you… move out of the startup culture,” he adds, “it can become about isolationist sort of protectionism.… People get into their individual corners, and they’re just trying to protect what’s already been built and protect their budgets, protect their jobs. And what goes away is that culture of learning and embracing failure.… If you stop embracing failure, then learning stops—and if you stop learning, then innovation stops.”
Startup culture trains future leaders
Andy Jassy started working at Amazon in 1997, three years after Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and shortly after the company went public. As a result, Jassy witnessed the startup culture in those first years and has since been with the company for 28 more, rising through the ranks all the while. He also learned Amazon’s brand of leadership (Amazon has a 16-point leadership philosophy). So when he speaks about the effectiveness of a startup culture, Jassy is speaking from experience.
“At the end of the day, tech companies are only as good as their innovation,” says Sam Wright, head of partnerships and operations at Huntr. “Startups… are able to move quickly, fail quickly, and thus innovate quickly—and I think that’s what Amazon is wanting… [what] they were so good at early on.… What they’re trying to capture again is that startup mentality.”
A startup’s initial employees often see the vision and understand that the startup could become an incredible company. Startup culture can also provide the opportunity to teach leadership skills in the trenches from day one. That’s the essence of what Andy Jassy is hoping to revive at Amazon, and what businesses of all sizes can add to their culture as they grow.
“It’s about empowering your workers… to make decisions that are impactful to the company,” Wright continues. “It requires a great hiring process to make sure you’re bringing on the right individuals.… But then… it’s really about letting those great people run and make decisions and have room to fail and iterate—because at the end of the day, that’s what startups do best.”
A startup culture eliminates bureaucracy and focuses on growth
When Jassy talks about creating a culture of owners and inventors, he mentions that speed is an important leadership decision. “The leadership team has to believe it’s a priority, reinforce it constantly, organize and remove structural barriers, and build in modular ways that enable pace,” he says.
He adds that his goal is to eliminate bureaucracy, be scrappy, have a team willing to take risks and “care most about delivering compelling results for customers.”
Eliminating bureaucracy and focusing on what’s important for growth is a lesson that Manuj Aggarwal, the founder and chief innovation officer of TetraNoodle Technologies, says is the foundation of startup culture. It’s about moving fast, breaking things and fixing them as they break.
“[As] companies grow larger, they cannot take that much risk for innovating so fast that things keep breaking all the time,” he says. “What they may want to do is keep a stable system but allocate a portion of their revenue toward startup culture so that, as they grow, they can maintain some continuity, but they can continue to innovate.
“So especially for a company like Amazon,“ he adds, “it’s important to bring back that culture of innovation.”
No matter how large your company becomes, maintaining a startup culture can help you accelerate growth. To do this, you can train growth-focused leaders who are self-disciplined and teams that are invested in the company as if it were their own.
How to keep startup culture alive—no matter how much you grow
“One of the things that Amazon does really well is they have the capabilities of empowering at the lowest level possible for individuals based on the leadership principles that they establish,” says Sylvania Harrod, a business advisor who previously worked with startups through Amazon Web Services. “So [a] prime example in Amazon, we always talked about day one culture. Before we made any decisions, we had to ask ourselves, ‘Is this day one, or is this closer to day two?’
“[Day] one meant… something that’s going to enable us to get to market faster or help serve our clients,” he continues. “Day two is a place where we start bringing in too much bureaucracy and we’re worrying more about the internal feelings of employees.”
According to Harrod, businesses should:
- Ensure that organizations have core leadership principles or values that the company operates on and that are shared consistently. This provides people within the organization with a north star to help them make decisions.
- Create a pulse for your organization so you can implement decision-making processes sooner.
- Increase the speed of implementation—time to market gives startups a tactical advantage over large companies.
- Keep iterating to get to market faster without dealing with too many managers and too much decision-making.
- Resist perfectionism—it’s about producing the minimum acceptable product that clients are willing to purchase, not being perfect.
The success of any business comes down to the vision and leadership of the person who started it. Ultimately, your example is what will encapsulate your company’s culture and dictate how well it’s maintained—so to keep the startup culture alive, lead with purpose.
Photo by EI Editorial/Shutterstock.com
