Quantcast
Channel: Inside Save22(formerly Lobangclub) » culture
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

The beginnings of startup culture: My experiences

0
0
communication 2 pix The beginnings of startup culture: My experiences

Culture is a very ephemeral thing, how do you define culture? and more importantly, how do you shape the culture of the company?

Everyone knows that culture begins with the founding team, the initial team will laydown the blueprint that will be the beginnings of a company culture.   When we were working remotely, things got done, but culture was not really being built.  Right now, we have five guys in the same room, at the far far end of Singapore, trying to finish the product in time for Echelon 2011.  So the culture of the company is forming, but what exactly is it?

The most visible form that culture takes is the working hours.   Most companies have some variation of the 9 to x culture, just down the hallway, the NTUV incubator culture is 9-6.   We have a 12 to midnight culture, everyone goes to lunch and dinner together.

The less visible form of culture that is beginning to form are the tribal words that form unique to the team, little secrets that only people within the team know, for example, the story behind why our company is called BOB FTW.

Then there is the language that shapes behaviour within the team, this is extremely important, it’s like a secret language, even though we’ve only had the guys together in the same room for 2 weeks, we already have the beginnings of tribal language.   The word “bikeshed“.  Opinionated people are very prone to have bikeshed discussions, just in the last week, we had a major Git vs SVN discussion, a Vim vs Eclipse discussion was also in danger of breaking out.  Just by my mentioning the word bikeshed, it defused the discussion.  We’ll see if this word becomes part of the company culture.

Another classical bikeshed discussion is naming of the app/company/product,  but that’s a blog post for another time…


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images