Cultural Co-Founders

Cultural Co-Founders

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece on LinkedIn about scale-ups and their need/importance of hiring Cultural Co-Founders. It appears it was well received and started an interesting thread of conversation.

Here it is again if you missed it…

Your first hires should be viewed as Cultural Co-founders and their skills not only determine WHAT your company can be but they’ll also determine WHO your company can be. They will build the genetics, the DNA of your culture and Founders should be involved in EVERY hiring process to screen for cultural fit.

Bad hires multiply and quickly affect your culture. If you prioritise skills over values and culture fit you’ll end up with a C grade culture and you’ll NEVER have an A grade culture.

Create an A grade culture from the beginning and preserve it. Culture is self-perpetuating through assimilation and association.

You may have the best PRODUCT in the world but if you make bad hiring decisions, especially in the early days, you’re FUCKED.

In addition to hiring the right cultural fit from day one, you need to build DIVERSE teams from day one. Smart Founders build diversity into their teams at the beginning. The key isn’t to put together teams who look or act like each other. The key is to put together a team who all believe in a shared PURPOSE and this needs to be done from the outset.

Building diversity into your teams as an after thought is rarely successful as the culture has already been formed and is difficult to change once it has been established.

AllSquares​ can help. Over the last 12 months, we have focused more and more on tech startups that are ready to scale and have lent experience and advice to a number of exciting businesses. Depending on where they are in their journey, we have designed the interview process with a focus on candidate experience, we have implemented software to help better manage your talent pools, we have helped Founders craft their story with which they excite potential employees and we have of course, helped them hire the best talent in the tech market.

If you’d like to know more about our services, or you’d like to read case studies on what we have done, please drop us a email and we’ll give you a call