 Well, we appreciate the opportunity to discuss a topic we're very passionate about, which is company culture. A little intro, as a contributing writer for Inc. and the author of an upcoming book, The Science of Story, I've had the opportunity and the privilege to interview over 1,000 leaders, from startups to major enterprises. And really to distill down the learning, the sentiment is that brands are truly a reflection of their culture. The topics focused on purpose-inspires, values guide. So I began to ask the following question, how do you bring your values to life? What does it mean to live collaboration, to live teamwork, to live innovation every day? And the responses could be grouped into one of two. The first, majority of the companies would say values are on our website, on our walls, and our charismatic leader talks about it every year. As the introduction went, they've got post-its to prove it. The most popular example has been, we live integrity by asking our people to make the right choices. The second group we've entitled Progressive Companies get really excited about talking about culture, and they share stories, behaviors, and rituals, and they would almost always ask, what's next, where do we go from here? That guided our research toward positive psychology, neuroscience, personal growth. We came up with a thesis. Purpose-inspires, values guide, habits define. As Aristotle said, we are, it's not what you know, it's what you do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. We then launched a research project called Pro Habits to prove the connection between living your company values and business outcomes. And that's how we met Nicholas in his amazing organization, Algolia, and today we'd like to give you guys a bit of an insight into how Progressive Company approaches culture innovation. Let's get into it, Nicholas. Let's do that. Let's do it. So let's begin at the top. Let's talk about what is the role of purpose within your organization? Sure. So for me, purpose is basically the why, the why of the company, the mission. If you want to know our case, we want to make interactions between people and software more rewarding, more meaningful. That's more like the mission, the purpose, where we are going. And to get there, we are building a search platform, like a technology to help us getting there. Wonderful. Let's talk about getting there. So let's connect the dots between purpose and culture. What does that mean? Well, where the purpose is the why, the culture is a big part of the how. Of course, you build your product and everything, but the culture is going to help you get on the right path, get towards this mission that you are defining for yourself. Wonderful. Well, so let's talk about the how, and I'm really intrigued as we talked extensively. Many companies have values on their walls, and they stop there. And to me, it's really the fundamental driver of the how. Let's talk about values. How do you bring them to life? Actually, it's not that simple. For us, I'm going to take our example. It took a lot of time. What happened is that from day one, we focused on the culture we wanted to build. We even did that before creating the company. And at that time, we defined that concept of ownership. We wanted to have a team that were owners, that were behaving like owners, taking initiatives, getting out of their comfort zone. That worked pretty well for the first few team members. But actually, when we got to about 10 people, it started to break. What happened there, you were speaking of habits, like people join you with their habits. They have worked before. They are going to revert to these habits by default. So the solution for us then was to basically start formalizing our culture, writing it down. At that time, that was just a wiki page explaining our thoughts about ownership. That was enough. It helped us make ourselves a bit more accountable so people could understand what we meant by ownership. It worked for some time. But then again, when we were maybe 30, 35 people, it broke again. What happened then, everyone was speaking about the culture all the time. But nobody really understood what that meant. What happened is like the example I often use is that that's when we started to introduce managers. Before that, we were just a flat organization. Before the team, being flat had become part of the culture. And that was this confusion between the organization itself and who we were that led us to do that new work on formalizing the culture and led us to define these core values that for us are more like the who, who we are, compared to the how we work. How we work should change every single day. As you scale your needs evolve, you cannot work the same way at 10, 50, 100 and more. The values is who you are, that shouldn't change much. You should still be able to stay who you are. Of course, of course. Well, let's give folks a perspective. Can you share some of the values that you have as an organization? Sure. At that time, we defined, so that was two years ago. It felt like we always had these values, which is a good sign. It means that there's probably the right one for us. The first one is grit. So grit is perseverance. We want people who try again and again. We don't want to see problems as challenges. We want to see them as opportunities to learn and to grow. So that's grit. It's very common in startups, really. Second one is trust. If we want owners, you need to trust them with everything. You need to enable them to make the right decision that they are level. That means you need to be extremely transparent. We are nearly 100% transparent. We share our investors' updates. Everyone knows how much cash we have in bank. The team knows everything. The third one is care. Care is one of these worlds that are often on the wall. For us, it's much more than that. Care is one of the things I'm the proudest of at the company is to see sales team members working alongside developers, getting sales and developers going on the same call, really helping each other because they care about each other. They care about one team that we're building and they're not just in their side. They exhibit care in their everyday. The fourth one, just to finish, candor. This one is critical for us. If you don't know that book, I would recommend you to read Radical Candor from Kim Scott. It's incredible. Candor is basically being brutally honest. If you want to help people grow, you need to provide feedback as much as you can. And we are candid because we care. All the values are going together. The last one is humility for us. It comes from the founders, but it really defines the voice of the company and actually helps us even when we want to share feedback. You care. You have to be humble in the sense that you have to know you can be wrong too. Understood. Well, let's go toward maybe an example within your tribe and real quick, at definition I've come to realize that when an organization is focusing on purpose and it's intentional, it doesn't feel right to call the people that work at that organization employees. Feels like we need a new word. So we're suggesting tribe, referring to them as a tribe. So if you could maybe give an example of how your tribe lives their values. We want to leave the values every single day. So to do that, to make yourself accountable, you need to make the values top of the mind. So everyone thinks about the value every day. So one simple trick you've done, so that's just an example, but I like this one. It's Slack on Slack. We basically created one emoji per value. What happened is that everyone is using these emojis to react on every message. Not everyone, but that. So when people are demonstrating care, like you are going to have the care emoji appearing, the greet emoji when they do out and beyond what was required and so on. Awesome. We also, you and I had chatted about how do you begin to get the tribe exposed to your values even before they come on board. So maybe discuss a little bit what would be the recruiting process implications as you are very serious and intentional about living your culture. We definitely want to filter on the culture, on the values when we hire people. So we are going to make that part, integral part of the recruiting process from the first call to filter out like rapidly the people who don't fit. And we always are going to have a non-site, like a one day on site, where the most of the day is spent of checking the values. We actually have like questions prepared for each of the value to dive in. And the thing is that during that interview process, you can also demonstrate the values, like care. Care is a very good one for that part of the process. You want to show to the candidates that you care for them. You are going to be curious, try to learn about them and not just ask random questions. And I had that example of a team member who joined us in New York a couple of months ago, crazy story when she shared that basically when we made an offer, she had like a few offers to consider. But the interview process was so intense that she felt at the end that she was already part of the company. So for her, that was a no winner. She felt she was already in the team. So she picked us. So interesting that the state of being, how she felt was a critical aspect of her decision to join the company versus just here's the salary, here are the bonuses, here's how many days off that we have. So where I'd like to go next is to talk about the idea of being best self. And just a quick reflection on my experience with Slush so far. What an amazing interaction from volunteers to the guests, to the speakers, to the investors. It got me thinking, is this what it feels like to pursue your best self? For those that are familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is this what the journey looks like towards self-actualization, towards self-transcendence? So here's a question for you, Nicholas. For the future leaders, do they have the dual responsibility? One is to be on the journey themselves and two, to become the inspiration and the facilitators for their tribes to pursue their best selves? Like, is the answer, yes. But the answer may be easier than acting on it, because, well, you know, when you are growing a company, you are going to spend your days building the company, like the operations, the day to day. So taking the time to actually focus on this, what you call this self-actualization, learning, improving yourself, helping others to grow, is actually challenging. It certainly is. Well, and I've heard that from many leaders within organizations. So I usually bring up two examples from the American history. One is Abraham Lincoln. When he was asked about mindfulness, he said, give me seven hours to chop down the tree. I'm going to spend the first four sharpening the axe. Do we spend enough time in our day to day to sharpen the mind? And the second is Benjamin Franklin, arguably a very busy guy, started every morning by asking the question of which virtue am I going to live to today? And then at the end of the day, he catalogued in his journal, what did he accomplish that day? So I throw really a challenge to the leaders to ask the question of what's more important than being or the doing, and if they're equally important, let's sharpen our minds. Definitely. It's equally important actually. Even if it's extremely difficult for us, especially as the company scale, it becomes more and more important. When you are 10 people, it doesn't matter as much. When you are 200 people, the impact you can have on the organization as one of the leaders grows tremendously. So all the time you can spend investing on the team, investing on yourself, making the team better, training them, showing the example, kind of like an incredible leverage. Same thing for you. If you invest on yourself, if you become a better leader, even if you become a five percent better leader, the impact you are going to have on the organization is going to be huge because the organization is growing. So it's really, really challenging to spend that time to sharpen your mind, but it's probably one of the best use of your time you can have as you continue to grow. Highest impact being intentional. You mentioned training. What do we dig just a little bit into? I know that you guys are reaching that next evolutionary cycle as a company grows and you're scaling and you've got culture aspect. Some of your offices are located across the globe. What are the challenges and how are you looking to address them through training? That's interesting. Culture is one of the most difficult things to scale. But it's also the best tool to scale. So this year we nearly tripled the company. In terms of employees we're close to 170 now. It was extremely challenging and I think we would never have succeeded if we hadn't spent so much energy on defining our culture, making sure people were embodying the culture, because then culture becomes organic. You don't need as much to do a top-down education about the culture because everyone is going to embody the culture and that's going to scale organically. That said, as you scale you are going to open new offices, you are going to hire many, many people that come from very diverse backgrounds, very different experiences and you want them to share the same values as you have. If half your people were not with you six months before, of course that has a huge impact on the organization. So at our scale today we want to make that even more intentional. So that goes with training. So we are starting to put in place trainings of the whole company and especially of managers. Managers are going to be a very key element in your organization about culture because they need to embody it even more than everyone else. They are going to be the example that people are going to follow. So this training, this coaching, we're trying to put in place a group coaching so that they can learn from each other are so important. Culture is never finished, if I can say that this way. I told you how we changed in time. We defined these values two years ago, but today and I'm sure in the coming years we'll have new challenges coming up one after the other. And so you always need to think proactively about how you can find new ways to improve your culture. And if you look at your time, which is very difficult to decide where to allocate it, and you think about culture for next year, compared to this year, compared to where you've been, how much time and energy and effort are you looking to allocate to be intentional by your culture? I think especially today, because of the scale we are reaching, I think I should probably double my energy there. That's one of the things that have the most impact, most leverage because you are going to make the team members better by investing on them. Then it doesn't mean that you should spend a crazy amount of your time because when you are working on these values, for example, it's often one-shot projects. Maybe you are going to spend a few days, a few weeks on that. But then what's important is to leave these values every single day. So it's no more times that you are going to dedicate at building the culture. It's time, it's not even time, it's like in every of your actions you need to embody the culture. You need to never let anything slip. If you see something that is not in line with your values, you should react right now when you see that happening and never let that happen passively. And if you do that, that means you are actually teaching, educating about the culture every day. Every day. As there is a startle set again, it's not what you know, it's what you do. Excellence is not an act, it's a habit. What would be one piece of advice that you would leave this room with? Be intentional about your culture. I'm not saying our culture is the best one or is the right one for other companies. But if you don't decide about your own culture, you are going to have a culture anyway. And your culture is going to be the sum of the habits of the people that are the teams you have. If you want to love your company tomorrow, make sure you build a company you want to work for tomorrow. And that means being intentional as early as possible about the kind of company you want to build. So be proactive about designing your culture very, very early. Awesome. Thank you, Nicholas. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Adam. All right. Thank you.