9th Lecture: Building a great company culture

I think that the company culture is more important than its business model. Indeed, all the Unicorns we know, all the most well known companies from the Stock Exchange have a very strong company culture. For example, Amazon has its 14 leadership principles, Google its “10 things they know to be true”.

Today, our guest lecturer was Gunnar Holmsteinn, COO of QuizUp. He pitched his company, then talked about the company culture and Teamwork (which is deeply related).

I really enjoyed the way he pitched his company. It was really structured and factual with figures but still personal. It was for me a great lesson of pitching, I learnt that to keep everyone interested in your pitch you have to divide it into three parts:
1) The features of your product (for your users/customers)
2) The figures (for your investors)
3) The touchy-feely way (for everyone)
To illustrate these words, Gunnar told us that his company was owning and running the biggest trivia game in the world (feature of the product), with more than 75 millions of users playing on about 30 000 topics (the figures) and thanks to the game some users met and got married, showing us thank you letters (the touchy-feely way).

Gunnar was easy to understand, funny and structured. It was only after his talk about QuizUp culture that I understood that he embodies it. When he arrived at QuizUp 2 years ago the company had the strengths and the weaknesses of all average successful start up: high talented people, high growth and a lot of fun but a lack of objectives, information flow and not defined areas of responsibilities. His main job was to solve these issues. For that, he established the company values:
-Help others learn: they are young so they don’t know everything, they shout for help.
-Fun in every action: it is a gaming company, they want to remain playful. For example, to have rates on the App Store, a message appeared when the user opened the app: “hey I just met you and this is crazy, but I am an App so rate me maybe”
-Drive the vision: every action they take is completely in harmony with their vision. They speak their mind; taking risk is their DNA
-Wait for nothing

To improve their teamwork, they have an external consultant who comes once a month during one week, he taught them the 5 points of a dysfunctional team (see below), to avoid them they have a real transparent communication: all the KPIs, results, meetings notes are public, they can also ask anything they want on a poster at the hall and once a week the CEO answers to the questions. They also have created the Quiz Up camp when during 2 days they stay outside of Reykjavik. The first day is focused on the past (accomplishments, failures, mistakes through a timeline with all the projects), the second one is focused on the future (how will be the company in the future, what’s next…)

As I told you as an introduction, I really think that the company culture is more important than the business model because when you have highly motivated talented people you can always find great ideas to merchandise but when you have a great idea without a healthy culture, you will never execute it in a good way.

Francois Freixanet