How this 5x founder creates company culture

How This 5X Founder Creates an Internal Culture With a "Crazy Focus" on Storytelling

I really appreciate much of how Drift CEO David Cancel thinks about storytelling. What's particularly interesting about his take, though, is that he believes storytelling is just as important internally as it is externally. For him, the power of internal storytelling manifests in the form of team clarity, productivity, and purpose. Here are five of he lessons he's learned about creating a strong internal culture with a "crazy focus" on storytelling. 

Buy, Don't Build

This is an important read for engineers and founders. The main point: If given the option to build or buy a custom service, opt for the latter. It's not so much the initial building process that takes a lot of time, but the long-term impact of maintenance, loss of focus, and opportunity cost. The considerations that might sway you to build—like wanting to avoid vendor lock-in or desiring total control over what the service does—are usually not as important as you'd think. Here's why. 

What Paul Graham Looks for in Founders

"When founders are both formidable and earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get." Having worked with, mentored, and invested in hundreds of founders over the years, I can attest to the importance of both of these characteristics. Paul Graham gives his take on the quality of "earnestness" specifically, and why it's such an important quality for founders to have even though it's not a word that comes up often in Silicon Valley. Can you think of any other qualities that are just as important for startup founders to have?  

Doerr's Law on Product Teams

Does your team have a missionary or mercenary mindset? It's commonplace to hear about the benefits of the former, but how exactly do you create a missionary team—a team that deeply believes in what they are doing and isn't just present to collect a paycheck? This is a helpful list of things you can do to create more of a missionary mindset, and my favorite is the idea of consistently explaining the why behind the what. 

Why Designers Should Be Embedded Into Product Teams

Though things don't break down quite this cleanly, in general, product companies structure their teams around projects or products, with the latter being the more popular of the two. In contrast, designers often follow something closer to a "project" model. While there are benefits to design teams operating like internal agencies, this is an interesting argument in favor of embedding designers into product-driven teams rather than layering them in on a per-project basis. 

Individuals or Teams: Who Is the Better Customer for SaaS Products?

While individuals might be lower hanging fruit on the customer acquisition tree, in the long run, team plans generate more revenue, more sustainably. One good example is Slack—revenue from annual cohorts of Slack customers keeps increasing YoY, not because there is no churn but because seat expansion exceeds churn. If you're building a SaaS business, it's worth asking how you can design or double down on Team plans so you have more of an opportunity to drive compounding revenue over time. 

DoorDash: From Application to IPO

Paul Buchheit has watched DoorDash grow from its YC application in 2013 all the way to IPO. What fascinates me about this retrospective is this note: "Many investors were skeptical, and [DoorDash] didn't make it onto the list of top picks from Demo Day, but fortunately, they were able to raise a seed round and keep going." In just seven years, DoorDash went from barely being able to raise a seed round to closing their first day on the public market with a market cap of $72 billion—pretty incredible. If nothing else, this piece is worth checking out for DoorDash's YC application video alone. 

Evolution of My Role as a Founder CTO

Much is written about the importance of scaling as a founder in a fast-growing startup, but Miguel Carranza points out that this mostly centers around the CEO role. As a first-time CTO, he had a hard time finding other CTOs who went all the way from MVP to IPO (compared to founding CEOs). He discusses the dilemma and gives a year-by-year overview of how he approached the scale challenge at the company he co-founded. The way he describes the dilemma between the CTO and VP of Engineering roles is fascinating, as well. Read on for his full thoughts.