This is Kristen O'Brien, Managing Editor at NFX, and this is the founder list. Audible versions of essays from technology's most important leaders selected by the founder community. On October 21 2013, Brian Chesky sent this letter to his entire team in the early days of Airbnb. He then decided to publish this memo, to help other founders who are building their own company cultures read by NFX. Don't up the culture. Hey, team.
Our next team meeting is dedicated to core values, which are essential to building our culture. It occurred to me that before this meeting, I should write you a short letter on why culture is so important to Joe, Nate, and me. After we closed our series c with Peter Teal in 2012, We invited him to our office. This was late last year, and we were in the Berlin room showing him various metrics.
Midway through the conversation, I asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us. He replied, don't up the culture. This wasn't what we were expecting from someone who just gave us a 150,000,000. I asked him to elaborate on this. He said, One of the reasons he invested in us was our culture, but he had a somewhat cynical view that it was practically inevitable once a company gets to a certain size to it up. How depressing I thought?
Were we destined to eventually fuck up our culture? We talked about it a bit more, and it became clear that it was possible to defend and actually build the culture, but it had to be one of the things we were most focused on. I thought to myself, how many company CEOs are focused on culture above all else? Is it the metric they measure closest? Is it what they spend most of their hours on each week? Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.
Our culture is the foundation for our company. We may not be remembered for much after we're gone. And if Airbnb is around a 100 years from now, surely we won't be a booking website for homes. We will be far past this in our evolution. Not to mention that kids a 100 years from now will be asking their grandparents what websites were. The thing that we'll endure for a 100 years, the way it has for most a 100 year companies is the culture.
The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products. So how do we build culture? By upholding our core values in everything we do. Culture is a 1000 things, a thousand times. It's living the core values when you hire. When you write an email, when you're working on a project, when you're walking in the hall, We have the power by living these values to build the culture.
We also have the power by breaking those values to up the culture. Each one of us has this opportunity, this burden. Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. Pete can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial.
And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we'll be able to take our next walk on the moon leap. Ever notice how families or tribes don't require much process, This is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations or even in a society where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules, and processes. There are days when it's easy to feel the pressure of our own growth expectations.
Other days when we need to ship product. Others still where we're dealing with the latest government relations issue. It's easy to get consumed by these. And they are all very Morgan. But compared to culture, they are relatively short term. These problems will come and go. But culture is forever. Morgan.
For more audio essays from the people who've built companies like Instacart, Facebook, Beller HubSpot and Dropbox, visit the founder list at nfx.com, or subscribe to the nfx podcast at podcast dot nfx.com Omri wherever you get your podcasts.