| 🔎 Some topics we will cover this week Inspiring entrepreneurs’ work ethics How to redesign the practices of company culture What makes Bernard Arnault special as a manager Stripe’s culture
👉 Brunello Cucinelli (Om) ❓Why am I sharing this article? I loved the thoughtfulness of their approach, and how it connects to our culture. I also thought the “fitness, diet, and soul are the things you can’t buy”, but you can get advice/tools from Alan.
Knowing your business:
➡️ I love this focus on knowing very well your business. Strong opinions about the markets: We went public, and we have more than 50 percent American investors as shareholders. Before going public, I said to them, “Are you looking for a company that grows very fast, that makes profits that are too high, in our view, quick profits? Do not invest in our company. Do you want a company that grows in a gracious way? That allows suppliers to grow alongside it, so that your artisans can grow as well as the company’s staff?” We went public, then all the banks came here, all the people, and we were until midnight the first days. There was one hour with just a sandwich, one hour coffee, one hour discussion. I said, “From tomorrow, everything changes.” So everybody turns up at 8 AM, and at 5:30 PM everybody leaves. That’s the only time we have available. I do not want to see any time wasted. I do not want during the day to see funny emails or joke emails. So we were able to go public without being overwhelmed. During the roadshow, the banks said to me, “You are supposed to meet eight to nine people in one-to-one meetings a day.” I said, “You must be crazy!” Am I supposed to meet someone for 45 minutes, and then another 45 minutes with someone else, then at 2 PM, I don’t know what I said or didn’t say? I said, “No, that’s not my way. I’m meeting five, tops, very focused, that’s it.”
➡️ I really liked how they thought about their roadshow. People & self-development: Hadrian the emperor said, “I never met anyone who after being paid a compliment did not feel better.” There are three things you cannot buy. Fitness: You have to keep fit, whether you’re rich or not. Diet: You cannot pay someone to be on a diet for you. I think that diet is the biggest sacrifice in my life. Then, looking after your soul. No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself. This is something you can do through culture and philosophy.
➡️ We can help with fitness, diet and soul. I love the approach. ➡️ Be focused! Charities & misc.: For example, he gives 20 percent of his company’s profits to his charitable foundation in the name of “human dignity” and pays his workers wages that are 20 percent higher than the industry standard, Cucinelli also pays for an artisan’s school in Solemeo: Young people are free to work either at his company or for another Italian company.
➡️ I love this idea to build the future of your hiring. I think it is still a bit early for Alan though given our size.
👉 How to Design (and Redesign) the Practices of Company Culture (Future) ❓Why am I sharing this article? I’m very much aligned with being to change some habits we have for a long-time in terms of culture (like Louis’ Corner drinks for example) as we are a lot bigger. What are the things we want to evolve? Over-communication is very important even when you don’t have the answers. Our senior Alaners should do it even more.
Scaling our culture, and being able to change some habits: When WeWork was founded in 2010, the company instituted a mandatory practice of bringing employees together during a three-day Annual Summer Camp. As the company grew, this practice remained. One of WeWork’s values was “together,” and this was a practice that the cofounders and a core group of leaders thought to be an expression of that. And that may have been true when the company had 10 employees, maybe even 100, but by 2017, at 4,000 employees, “Summer Camp” got complicated. Security and HR concerns aside, the practice, given the size and scope of the company, became quickly outdated. Could WeWork have retained the essence of the connection it sought through the Summer Camp, but in a different way that appealed to more employees? In reviewing its practices, WeWork could have investigated the practices of other companies that grew too large to have one global event. If they had, they might have been inspired to have smaller, local team events that didn’t include tents, overnight stays, or even alcohol, keeping the focus on connection and community and less on managing the omnipresent discomfort and stress.
One of the mistakes many growing companies make is keeping the same processes and practices they used when they had 20 employees, even though their company has grown to 500, 1,000, or even 3,000 employees. Fortunately, it is possible to keep the essence of what that practice intended to do—mostly building team camaraderie, community, and connection—while also evolving the practice to ensure it continues to be inclusive and scalable.
Over-communication: When I work with leaders on how to communicate important updates, the takeaway is to over-communicate, even if we don’t have all of the answers. One of my mentors used to tell me that if I felt like I was communicating too much, that probably meant that I was communicating just enough. Leaders often don’t communicate because they don’t think they have any valuable information to share. Yet, good communication is about more than updates. It’s about connection.
👉 LVMH: The Wolf in Cashmere’s Conglomerate (Join Colossus) ❓Why am I sharing this article? The importance of thinking very long-term and being committed to our core projects. The combination of distributed ownership and very deep attention to quality, details and excellence.
Long-term: Samaritan department store in Paris, which I think Mr. Arnault acquired in 2001, in 2005 the building was closed to the public, and it reopened again in 2021. So 16 years later. And I think it was estimated that LVMH spent about a billion dollars restoring that building over those 16 years before they reopened. I think it's such a great example of how Mr. Arnault and LVMH really take the long term view. Very few businesses, public or private, will be able or willing to spend that sort of money up front for a period as long as that, before they generate any sort of revenues or earnings again.
Org: When you look at the divisions, they're just for reporting purposes. All the brand CEOs report directly to Mr. Arnault. He's very demanding. He's very detail oriented. He spends a lot of time, especially when it comes to LV and Dior, he spends an awful lot of time on the detail. So you have this strange dynamic between, on the one hand, full decentralization, where all the brands are fully autonomous, and they run their P&L, and they answer to no one but Mr. Arnault. But on the other hand, you have a chairman/CEO/founder who is obsessive about detail and who really keeps all his brand seals on top of things.
👉 Claire’s Offsite Toolkit (Coda) Move a set of people from being a ‘work group’ to becoming a ‘team Evaluate progress while planning future priorities and goals Engender long-term strategic thinking
👉 Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on (Arstechnica) ❓Why am I sharing this article? These “Knowledge Navigator” promos showed a foldable, tablet-like device with a humanoid “virtual assistant” that interacted via spoken instructions. While some derided the impracticality of these sci-fi vignettes, they fired up Apple employees and got them thinking about the future of computing.
👉 Stripe’s Growing Pains: A Payments Star Hits Snags in Push for Big Businesses (The Information) ❓Why am I sharing this article? Their survey is interesting. It is also underlining why the question on salary is always a poor one in my view, as you don’t learn anything (even at the best paid companies including Google, people are unhappy when asked this question). One idea on marketing to get all the best new created companies (economics to be tested).
Culture:
➡️ I’d like us to be a little more careful on the food we have at the office too (even if it is far from being dramatic). Asked whether they saw themselves working at Stripe in two years, only 30% of respondents from one of the sales teams at the company responded affirmatively, according to a document described to The Information. In comparison, the companywide percentage who answered yes to that question was more than double that figure, the document said.
➡️ We could add this question in our every 6 months survey. In the same survey, only 58% of respondents companywide agreed with the statement: “I believe my total rewards (base salary+bonuses+benefits+equity) package is fair, relative to similar roles at other companies.”
➡️ I don’t think the question of the salary is the right one. Growing with customers: The company routinely offers credits for using Stripe services to startups, including those that came through Y Combinator and from the portfolio of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, one of Stripe’s largest shareholders, according to people familiar with these deals. Those credits can give startups around $40,000 to $70,000 to apply to future transaction fees on payments made using Stripe, one of the people said. The strategy has paid off for Stripe, which says it brought on an average of 1,400 new companies a day in 2021.
➡️ One idea could be to give away a €5k credit for Alan to top VC-backed companies? I don’t know if it is a good idea and what should be the math though. We could look at historical data of top-VC-backed companies that we have since inception?
👉 Thread by Job - Co-founder and CEO @remote (PingThread) ❓Why am I sharing this article? Document things yourself. Don't delegate minor documentation tasks if you're directly involved. No one is too big to write documentation.
👉 What I Miss About Working at Stripe (Every) ❓Why am I sharing this article? I think it connects well to the parts of our culture that are demanding, on how to enjoy them. I think we should not hide the demanding side of shipping great products or achieving amazing things as a group. It is hard. The question is how we make it enjoyable together, how we love what we do together, how we welcome feedback as something very positive and not draining. How to get your work better because it is “meticulously but warmly critiqued by your peers” Do work you’re proud of and lean on and support your colleagues to do the same. There is imposter syndrome at Stripe too. How to make work a source of meaning in life (not the only one obviously) How to fight the path of least resistance
Pushing for excellence: Everyone stayed for dinner every night—in part because there was work to do, in part because chef Tony was cooking up something delicious, but mostly because there was no way I was going home before my neighbor was. My colleagues chimed in on my work—because I asked them to, and because it made the work better, not because they didn’t trust me. My work was meticulously but warmly critiqued by my peers and leaders alike, and my work got better and better because of it. You couldn’t get through a single day without hearing the operating principles cited multiple times in the run of work. Getting there requires working your butt off to do work you’re proud of and leaning on and supporting your colleagues to do the same. There’s no way around it: the culture was demanding. I spent many late nights working. I cried more than a few times after feeling like I let a user or a colleague down. My heart would beat out of my chest before heading into an exec review. My imposter syndrome was through the roof.
Making work a source of meaning in life: It’s more about missing that universal agreement that it’s really, really cool to devote yourself fully to your work. And to expect that from your colleagues in a way that makes you feel that “we’re all really, really, really in this together” kind of way. I’m all for creating healthy boundaries that keep us satisfied and emotionally healthy—inside and outside of work. And of course I believe you can love something without it having to hurt. But I’ve never truly loved anything that didn’t move me to my core. I can’t help but wonder if all this effort we’re putting into keeping work at arm’s length is actually holding us back from being our best selves.
How to fight the path of least resistance: If your closest collaborators don’t turn stuff around quickly, why would you? If there’s no one in the room agitating for doing that extra copy pass to punch up that blog post, why not just ship the meh version and use the extra time for a jog or a drink with friends? The path of least resistance is right in front of us, and we are taking it.
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