This document discusses how startups can maintain their culture as they scale. It emphasizes that company culture is the foundation for innovation and future products. As a company grows, it is important to keep the vision and values clear, hire the best people, develop leaders, operate with a customer-obsession, and maintain an experimental and metrics-driven approach. Large companies like Amazon and Airbnb are cited that have been successful by prioritizing culture as they scaled rapidly.

1. Keep your Startup DNA as you scale your startup
Bijal Nagrashna
Senior Startup Business Development Manager – Nordics & Baltics
@HeyBijal

2. Bijal Nagrashna
• Startup Business Development Manager for
AWS in Nordics and Baltics
• Former startup founder. Emerging Markets
Asset Mgt, M&A and consulting experience
• bijaln@amazon.com

4. Company Building

5. And yet…

7. Brian
“What is the single most important
piece of advice for us?”
Peter
“Don’t ‘f***’ up the Culture”
https://medium.com/working-life/597cde9ee9d4

8. “The culture is what creates the
foundation for all future innovation. If
you break the culture, you break the
machine that creates your products.”
Brian Chesky, Founder
https://medium.com/working-life/597cde9ee9d4

9. “The product is the product.
The culture is the next hundred products”
Phil Libin, (ex CEO Evernote), MD
General Catalyst
www.fastcompany.com/3012870/dialed/evernotes-quest-to-become-a-100-year-old-startup

10. “Structured teams, fluid responsibilities”

11. What is your Startup DNA??
How do you build and keep your
Culture as you hire and scale your
business?

12. Startup Phase
"A company becomes the people it hires"
Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

13. # 3 Investor Pitch Deck
Biggest Challenge = Finding People
# 1 Customer Pitch Deck
# 2 Employee Pitch Deck

15. “The culture is what creates the
foundation for all future innovation”
- Brian Chesky, CEO airbnb
Keep your company vision and
values crystal clear

16. When you are scaling
“Good culture creates an environment
where people can do their best work”
Mike Curtis, VP Engineering, Airbnb

17. “Loosely coupled, tightly aligned”

20. Growup Phase

21. customer obsession
ownership
invent and simplify
are right, a lot
hire and develop the best
insist on highest standards
think big
bias for action
frugality
vocally self critical
earn trust
dive deep
have backbone; disagree & commit
deliver results
Culture – Amazon Leadership Principles

23. ownership
Leaders are owners. They think long-term and don’t sacrifice long-term
value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company,
beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job."

24. DevOps

25. two pizza teams

26. hire & develop the best
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They
recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the
organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in
coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for
development.

27. Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will be, the single most important element
of Amazon.com's success.”
- Jeff Bezos 1998 letter to shareholders
Always hire the best people

28. Ensuring the right hiring decision is
made every time
1. Performance bar - Is the
person better than 50% of
the current team
2. Long Term Impact - Does
this candidate have upside
growth potential to have
long-term impact?

29. Develop a robust & repeatable hiring process
Phone Screen 1
Interview 1
Interview 2
Interview 3
Interview 4
Interview 5
Written Exercise
Phone Screen 2
Customer Obsession
Earns Trust
Dive Deep
Think Big
Bias for Action
Invent & Simplify
High Standards
Backbone D&C
Deliver Results
Hire & Develop the
Best
Competencies
Competencies

30. Feedback Decision
Hire
No Hire
Develop a robust & repeatable hiring process

31. dive deep
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, and audit
frequently. No task is beneath them.

32. Weekly ops metric meetings
a scorecard for each service team
a graph for every metric that customers care about
each graph has a line…fitness function
Correction of Error (COE) process
Amazon has a very metrics-driven culture

33. But then TJ gets an unexpected
e-mail from Amazon...
“We noticed that you
experienced poor video
playback. We’re sorry for
the inconvenience and
have issued you a refund
for $3.99”
http://consumerist.com/2013/05/02/amazon-notices-our-streaming-video-was-glitchy-proactively-issues-refund/

34. customer obsession
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work
vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay
attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

35. Press release to capture the customer
perspective#1
FAQ to answer any questions a customer
might have#2

36. Press release to capture the customer
perspective#1
FAQ to answer any questions a customer
might have#2
Start finding the right ‘primitives’#3
Launch, then iterate fast & often#4

37. Rate of Experimentation

39. 11.6s
Average time
between
deployments
(weekday)
1,079
Max number of
deployments in a
single hour
(or approx every
3 seconds)
30,000
Max number of
instances
simultaneously
receiving a
deployment
Speed of deployments at amazon.com
May 2011

40. Culture
Mechanisms
Organisation
Startup DNA

41. Questions?
@HeyBijal
bijaln@amazon.com
aws.amazon.com/startups
aws.amazon.com/activate
@AWSstartups