A winter ritual. California. Santa Cruz Mountains. No snow at our altitude, but normally a decent amount of rain that starts sometime around Thanksgiving and sticks around until March or so.
California mountains. In a redwood forest that has been shaped by running water for much longer than there have been humans building things. Building a house in the mountains means considering the land. Is it base rock? Is it clay? How much is it going to move when it shakes? A lot? Okay, then dig deep piers. Fill them with rebar and concrete and you have a solid foundation.
However, there is still water. When I say “water,” you’re probably thinking that stuff you drink. Maybe you’re thinking of a large body of water near you. Maybe there are waves in this water. Maybe not. The water I’m talking about is the stuff that falls from the sky and then runs down the hill. A simple act that over hours, days, months, and years leads to erosion. It’s the water grabbing loose stuff in the ground and bringing it along for a ride. Thanks, gravity.
Over periods of heavy rain, what was solid ground can become so saturated that it turns into a liquid. As a liquid, the former dirt, now mud, has a different relationship with gravity. It’s called a mudslide.
Because we don’t want our mountain homes sliding down the hill, we work to move all running water elsewhere. Roof gutters lead to spouts, which lead to pipes that divert rainwater away from the house. Roads funnel to drains, which do the same.
This is where I come in.
It’s a rainy season tradition that in the middle of a big rainstorm, I put on boots, waterproof pants and jacket, and a wide-brim brown hat. I grab my favorite shovel and I wander our property looking for where water runoff is being hindered. Leaves, logs, really anything can stop a well-intentioned temporary creek.
You think I do this because I don’t want my house slipping down the hill—and you’re right. This is on the list of the reasons. But at the top of the list is the fact that I derive immense pleasure from the delicate craft of curating rivers and creeks. Today, I spent three hours hiking around both my property and, uh, everyone else’s property making sure that creeks and rivers were flowing properly.
I’ve heard my favorite engineers claim the reason they are productive is because they are lazy. It’s a humblebrag. These humans don’t have a lazy bone in their bodies. What they appreciate is efficiency. I want to design this system so I only have to do this once.
Setting up the initial conditions and letting the work just happen.
Hike down one of these creeks, clear debris, open up a passageway for a small rivulet, and then just stare…for a very long time. Immense pleasure. I have a similar fascination with staring at a fire in the fireplace. My brain is wired to derive pleasure not just from the intricate fractal details of a running creek or a burning log, but from the fact that I can also see evidence of my own underappreciated productivity in these things.
I can see the water productively flowing down the hill, and I can also see the water that will flow. I know that at the end of the rainy season a small temporary creek will have carved a foot-deep cut in the ground. In another five years, Mother Nature will have made a small canyon here with the help of well-placed water, dirt, and gravity.
My responsibility: keep an eye on it. Sometimes I’ll need a shovel. My ability to change the course of this runoff will decrease with each passing year, as the creek digs into the ground and grows.
I need you to remember this creek when you start a new job.
My chosen profession for the better part of a decade has been arriving at a rapidly growing start-up with a hundred or so employees. I’ve tried being employee 20, and while the experience was invaluable, the risk profile I’ll now accept in my ideal company is closer to employee 100. At this stage the company has likely proven its business and is ready to scale. Sign me up.
Recalling my recent experiences at three such rapidly growing start-ups, I can confidently state three things:
As I mentioned in Chapter 19, each of these start-ups firmly believes the problem set it is facing is unique and will require novel solutions. They are mostly wrong.
The humans already present at these start-ups have developed a unique and efficient bond amongst themselves that is nigh impossible to replicate with the new helpful humans who arrive. This is unfortunate.
Most everyone is going to talk about how to build the culture, but the vast majority of the culture has already been built. No matter how many times a group of well-intentioned humans plasters a new set of values on the wall, the culture will not significantly change while the founding team is running the company. Really.
You might think the latter point is controversial and depressing.
Let’s remember: this set of humans pulled off a miracle. Through an incredible amount of hard work, they’ve created a company. Not just any company, but one that is starting to look successful. They’ve had everyone they trust tell them it was impossible, they had to tell the half-baked story of their idea long before they had anything resembling a working product, and they had to attract others to their mission when they knew in their back of their minds the chances of success were low.
From these trials came a set of stories, and when you start a new job, your job is to listen for them.
Your company’s values are painted in huge black block letters on the wall. Let me guess:
We Value Transparency
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
We Are the Customer
Be Kind
We Are Obsessed About <Something>
Am I close? I bet I got at least one, and another is a mere synonym away from correct. The fact that there are similarities in start-ups’ values isn’t a surprise because all these companies are built by risk-taking, ambitious, slightly-off-kilter humans who love the challenge of bringing the new into the world…and they all face similar challenges. I love working with and learning from these folks, and one of the important lessons they’ve taught me over the years is that the words on the walls are less important than the stories they tell.
Listen. Maybe it’s the first argument that you hear amongst the team. Perhaps it’s a complicated design decision. No one is going to raise their hand and state a value: “We Are the Customer.” Someone will tell a story. Here’s what it might sound like:
Remember when AJ and Carol couldn’t agree? Design and engineering. Going at it. They were in completely opposite corners and no matter how hard we tried to build the peace, they could not see eye to eye. We were about to call in the CEO hammer, but the moment they heard that they bolted. Out the front door—together—and they walked around the city until midnight. A six-hour 1:1. They came back to an empty office, moved their desks together, and worked all night on the design. When we came back in the morning, he was asleep under his desk, and she was off getting celebration donuts for the entire office because she knew we’d just successfully designed our most important feature.
This story explains why there are donuts every Tuesday morning. This story also explains why AJ is now the VP of Product and Carol is now the VP of Engineering, but the reason they tell the story over and over again when the stakes are high at this hypothetical company is to remind everyone:
Engineering and design are equal partners.
There is a healthy tension in this partnership.
With it, we can do anything.
This is what actually happened. AJ and Carol did have a big fight that one time and they did leave, but it was because they were both attending a going-away party where they had a drink. They happened to discuss the feature in question. They discovered something and told people about that something (and brought totally unrelated donuts) the next morning.
However, you’re going to hear the AJ and Carol story over and over again. It’ll show up not just because it was a formative moment in the company’s history, but because we bond over the stories we tell. It’s how we connect and form the collective us from all the individual Is. A story is told and retold to remind us what is important. It will assist in answering hard questions. The stories that define a company remind us of what it took for us to get here. They shape the narrative and define the culture.
These stories are the culture. Not the words on the wall. It’s convenient when the stories and the words support each other, but I’ve worked at companies where teamwork was preached as a core value—I heard about it during the interview process, it was an essential part of onboarding—but the first real story I heard over lunch was how the CEO was a horrific dictator.
The stories that define a culture are not a deliberate strategy. No one called a meeting to decide which stories mattered to the company. A core set of humans in the building retold the stories that mattered to them, over and over again, slowly carving a well-defined path in the consciousness of the company. With time, it becomes religion. When we’re in situation X, we tell the tale of story Y. Does story Y always apply to situation X? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s the story we tell.