Get tips straight from a startup on ‘best company culture’ lists

Alex is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

They say nothing in life is guaranteed except death and taxes. I’m not sure who “they” are, but I’m sure they don’t work at startups, where uncertainty, emotional turbulence, and the difficulty of attracting amazing people for lower-than-corporate salaries is largely guaranteed.

At the same time, executing against these challenges can define whether your startup—which you’ve poured countless of hours into, have lowered your personal hygiene standards for, and have forgone a high salary for—lives or dies.

So, what tools do we have at our disposal? The answer: an intentionally designed company culture which provides an advantage in hiring talent, keeps our teams motivated, and aligns our team’s actions with our mission.

Enter Daniel Ha, the founder of Disqus, a networked community platform with 50 million monthly comments and 17 billion page views. Disqus has been featured in countless “best company culture” lists on the internet, and their culture deck can be found almost everywhere. 

Disqus founder Daniel Ha. Photo credit: Disqus

In this interview, Ha tells us how he approached intentionally designing his company’s culture, how he got it to stick, and how it’s helped them to get their product on to hundreds of thousands of websites.

How he defines culture

Ha defines culture as the personality of the company. Just as a company’s brand determines the customer experience, a company’s culture determines the employee experience.

It also helps to set guidelines for what kind of behavior is encouraged and discouraged and helps to set the company spirit (what is it like to work here?).

From Ha’s experience, a strong company culture:

1. Keeps people motivated and engaged through the highs and lows of a startup.
2. Provides the team with guidelines that affect everything—from the company’s services and products to how customers are treated.
3. Lives on when the founders are not in the room.
4. Attracts like-minded employees and helps mitigate the initial shortcomings of a startup when hiring talent.
5. Blends the values that the early team personally believes should persist over time with values that support the strategy and mission of the company.

Re-hauling their culture

Early on, Disqus had an informal, nonoperational value: “Be Disqusey.” Being non-actionable and platitudinal, it had little impact on how the employees operated.

At their weekly wind-down meetings, they started asking employees, “Do you know the values of this company?” They found that the team largely missed the point. According to Ha, this led to one of their first insights: “People didn’t consistently remember our values, and could not name them definitively.”

So, Ha started by listing some of the actions that the staff could do on a regular basis that he felt created a better work environment, that supported their strategy and mission, and would benefit the community and, ultimately, the company.

Values and their impact

Getting company values to stick