 Hi, everyone. I'm Q. Hamirani and my job here today is to make you better at your jobs. Sounds good, right? No, I'm not going to claim to be a better CEO or COO or sales rep than you. But what I am going to argue today though, is that by building a strong culture, you can make everybody at your company better at their jobs. So let's dive in. But first, what is culture? How do we define culture? Imagine starting your work day, ready to be productive, getting a cup of tea or coffee, turning on your laptop, sitting at your desk, either at home or in the office or on a beach, wherever you're working from that day. And when you open up your computer, instead of being met with a smooth start that you're used to, you're met with a fairly unexpected surprise. Your laptop has frozen. The operating system that you are used to is in disarray. You're left with an unresponsive computer. You're struggling to communicate with your team and you are unable to complete tasks to be effective. Simply put, you just cannot be productive. Without a right operating system for your laptop, the entire thing is pretty much useless. Without the right operating system, your laptop is just a piece of hardware or a really expensive and big fancy paperweight. Culture to the company is what the operating system is to your laptop. It's how you make things happen. It's the glue that sticks everything together. So just like when you open your laptop and it works fine, you are able to be productive and get work done as you anticipated to do. When you have a good strong culture in the organization, it creates a common sense of belonging and purpose, which in turn fosters productivity, collaboration, innovation, and for you to meet the goals that you want to achieve. So your culture is your operating system. It's not the operating system from Google or any other big company because you define what it is. You are the culture carriers for your organization. Just as when a laptop in my previous example glitches and needs software updates and it may need to continue to evolve over time, so does your culture. You may need to make organizational updates, example hire new leaders or build new functions. You may need to do smaller updates like performance management or provide coaching or mentoring to your employees. But you have to continuously keep a pulse on your culture. When you have a laptop that was unable to let you do your work, in the similar context, if you have a culture that you are not keeping tabs on, it will eventually lead to a weak operating system within your organization. And what does that do? That will lead to lack of information flow, lack of ability to make decisions and move quick with agility, and in turn, it will dilute your culture over time. So keep a tab on your culture. Your culture is your operating system. And if you do not keep up with it, you will never let your employees reach their maximum potential. So this is what we're going to dive into today. How do you build and scale your own culture? And work through that. But why should you take this from me? I want to explain my journey, which is I did not study HR and I did not start my career or my education in people and culture as well. Simply put, I learned all this the hard way. I studied electrical engineering in university. That's the start of my kind of education. I then had my first internship in college at General Electric, where I worked on a manufacturing flow and I was helping individuals that had worked on a specific machine for 30, 35 years to make their processes and life easier. And that was when I realized that the first thing you need to do is understand perspectives and relate to people. I then went on to start my career after university at Deloitte, where I worked for five years with CFOs and COOs at the intersection of finance, technology, people and operations. I then went to Aeon for a couple years and did global strategy and operations across Europe and South America. And one thing I noticed while I was working for these seven years at Deloitte and Aeon was that some projects that had the best plan, they had everything in place, would fall flat and be unsuccessful because they had the wrong people in the wrong roles to execute. And on the other side of the spectrum, some projects that were relatively loosely planned ended up becoming really successful because the people in the roles had the agility and the determination to figure it out and make it successful. So this was when around seven, eight years into my career I had this realization that people can make or break the best process, the best product if you don't have the right people in the right roles. So I set out to venture and work in the field of HR for two reasons. One, I thought it was the most impactful way to drive change because if you are helping an entire organization you're helping a large number of people within the organization. And two, I was fairly frustrated with the level of partnership I was getting with HR professionals to help me build the right org structure. So what did I do? I quit my job at Aeon and I started my own company. In a span of three years, I had three different companies. One focused on people, one focused on logistics and distribution. It had nothing to do with either. And the third one actually failed right after we took off and I actually learned more from the failure of that company than the successes. I was the founder in this situation and I know how hard it is when you're trying to build product market fit. You're fighting for survival in early stages. But people and culture often get deprioritized. But I'm here to help you understand why you should try to keep a pulse on it. I then started my HR career at the Warranty Group. I was there for four years. I pretty much did every role in HR from recruiting to compensation to HR business partnering. The Warranty Group was backed by a private equity firm so I got to work in that environment to understand how operational efficiencies can be driven with the right people again. I then went to JLL, Jones Long LaSalle, where JLL has over 100,000 employees. My team was very large over 50 people and I got exposure to what impacting at scale with people is like. After that I went to Airbnb. I was there for five years up until earlier this year. I was there through some really interesting milestones from hyper growth to layoffs to IPO and then building the future of work program at Airbnb. So that was the last 10, 12 years of my career where I dedicated it to the people profession in that context. Today, as of the last seven or eight months, I'm the chief people officer and communications officer for a series D education technology company called PAPO. And I'm also an advisor, investor, and executive coach to founders as I continue to work through this. So that's a little bit about me and why you should listen to me in terms of how I had to learn the hard way and what I want to share with you. Throughout my entire journey, I have come to realize that there is one simple truth that is true and that is people can change everything. You may notice Ada Lovelace on the slide. She was a mathematician in the early 19th century that is directly attributed to creating one of the first general purpose computers. Back to my comment on people can change everything. People are the key to success or failure depending on how they are positioned. You as founders and operators are the key culture carriers to enable success across your entire organization or failure. I think everyone hopefully is familiar with the term technical debt out here if not for folks that are not. Technical debt is commonly referred to the process where you move and compromise speed for accuracy. So think of if you're building an app, you want to go to market really quick, you want to capture market share, you don't want to wait too long, you don't know if it's going to work, you would build technical debt because you might take shortcuts to get the app out there. For example, your app might work for a couple thousand people but it's not ready for a couple million people. So when it is ready for a couple million people you come back and catch up to the technical debt that you placed so that you can continue on. The reason I mentioned that is what I call organizational debt is very similar to technical debt. It's the debt that you collect on the people and culture side as you are growing very quickly, especially after you've got product market fit and through that successful phase. Organizational debt in my view is far more dangerous than technical debt because it can really take your organization down if you don't have the right people in the right roles. Again, having organizational debt is okay because it's a by-product of being successful and moving really quick. However, what you should try your best to keep tabs on is how much debt are you collecting in this org debt bucket. The more debt you collect and the more you essentially ignore your culture and your operating system that you are building the longer and harder it will be to come out of that debt. So again, organizational debt is a by-product of being successful. It is okay to have, but you should also know that it's being built and how much of it can you mitigate over time by keeping tabs on it. I want to talk a little bit about my experience at Airbnb. So when I joined Airbnb in 2018, it was the summer of 2018, we were just shy of 3,000 employees. In my first year, we grew to almost a little over 8,000 employees just in less than a year. What happened while we were growing rapidly was we built teams, brand new teams, standing them up, brand new leaders and we essentially started collecting org debt in the process. Again, it's a by-product of being successful. What happened was teams were working really well within their individual silos, but it was really hard to get any large cross-functional initiative that needed every team's collaboration example IPO readiness to be done in a timely way. This was because information flow was hard, our operating system had started to outgrow our size. Again, the by-product of being successful. What happened was, so this was, I'm now in mid 2019, where we were behind on it, we had collected some org debt. As you go into the end of 2019 and into early 2020, as we all know, we were hit with the pandemic. That put Airbnb in an even harder position because our business had stalled in addition to us collecting org debt. We had simply outgrown our operating system and would do for a really, really large system update. The news at that time, so this is in March of 2020, is this the end of Airbnb? Will we make it? We had to raise at a very low valuation. We had to make sure we were going to survive. So what could have saved Airbnb? Or what did save Airbnb? To get to that, I want to talk about what I think are the three ingredients that you can focus on to develop a good culture or your operating system. One is purpose. Having a common sense of purpose to achieve a common mission is critical to ensuring that you have the right operating system in place. I work at PayPal right now. It's in the education space. We're trying to change the future generation by providing them with more learning opportunities from kindergarten all the way through school before college. And everyone that is at PayPal is there because they believe that they want to change the future of education. That's our purpose. The second one is values. So this, if the purpose is the why, the values is part of the how. How do we want to behave with each other? What are our norms? What are our ways of working so that we can share information with each other and we can do it in a unified way so that it's not everyone working in chaos, in silos. The third one is coming back to people. People are the key to success. You do need to think through, do you have the right org design? Do you have the right people? If not, how do you update your operating system? And how can you make sure that people are a consideration in your org design? You could invent the best things in slice bread, but if you don't have the right people, you're not moving fast. And the more important thing to note is you are not enabling your own employees to reach their maximum potential because they are being hindered through the information flow. So these are the three key ingredients of culture. The intersection of these is what defines your culture, is what defines your operating system to enable you to reach your goals. I want to talk about three tips to help build a great culture, something that I've learned over the years and want to share. Tip number one. This is for founders, operators and everyone here. Be real, be authentic, be vulnerable. What I mean by this is I've worked with founders that often want to share the good news to the entire company but don't want to necessarily share the setbacks in anticipation that they're worried that if they share setbacks it may not come off as being as encouraging. What happens when you do that is employees eventually catch up, they know, and life is full of pluses and minuses, right? It's not all roses all the time. So the unintentional consequence of not being real, not being authentic, not being transparent is the lack of leadership that the employees eventually perceive. And if your employees are not going to trust your leadership you're weakening your operating system right there. Those values that you want to operate by are weakened. So be real, be authentic. The one tip I have here is also evaluate your communication plan and strategy. Do you have the right mediums in place? Do you have the right channels for information sharing? An example is do you have all hands? Are you meeting with your company on a regular basis? If you are, which you should, are you sharing all the information to give them the full picture or are you just sharing part of it? What you do as founders and what you share is the example you're going to set for the rest of your organization. So that's tip number one. Tip number two is even when you're in hyper growth always focus on building the right team. You want to focus on the right hire. Something that I learned and we did at Airbnb and we still do it to this day is every candidate that goes through the interview process goes through two cultural fit interviews. These interviews are done by employees of Airbnb who volunteer their time and I've got trained but the key point to note here is these interviews are done by employees that are not going to be part of the function that the candidate is going to be interviewing for. This forces the conversation to be very specifically driven on our values, our mission. This is the cultural fit. This is what enabled us to reduce the all debt so that we could try and recover when it was time to catch up for an update. This was also a way for our founders to let go of interviewing every single candidate because we built a scalable way to infuse these cultural interviews for every single candidate. The key here is if a candidate did not pass these two cultural interviews they were not getting into Airbnb. There was no exceptions. So build the right team. Once you hire the right people, onboarding is the other piece that I would really recommend focusing on because when you hire the right fit you need to communicate what your values are so again you can have the ingredients for the operating system. So focus on when you're onboarding it, make it interactive, make sure they understand what your core values are, how do you want to lead by example, and build the right team. So that's tip number two. Tip number three is what I call the brilliant asshole paradox. To define what this is, this is typically an individual that excels at business outcomes for their specific function but no one wants to work with. They either don't like, either it's the communication, either it's the ways of working, but people just do not want to work with these individuals. Ask yourself, what are you doing with brilliant assholes at your company today? Are you recognizing them and rewarding them? Are you reprimanding them or providing them coaching so they can actually learn and get better and grow with the organization as you scale? Again what you do here will in turn define your rewards and recognition philosophy as opposed to what you want others to behave like. So make sure you think through what that is going to look like and what you do is going to define it. So doing nothing in this instance is the worst thing you can do. Think through performance measures and performance measures for these types of individuals could be parting ways and that's something you have to really think through. These are the milestones that you want to keep tabs on for your debt. Do you want to part ways? Do you want to provide mentoring and coaching? What do you want to do to make sure that you avoid this scenario or mitigate it is a better word. So I want to come back to the Airbnb story. So I left off in March of 2020 where the headlines was will we even make it? Our operating system we had outgrown it because we had hired people in one year almost four or five thousand people. We were operating in silos. We had a divisional structure at that time. What that means is we had a GM model where each business managed all the functions within their specific business unit and we had a choice at that time. What were we going to do about it? And the answer for us was we were going to reset our operating system. We were going to create that system update that we needed that we had outgrown to make sure that we could operate in an efficient way and collaborate share information so that we could pull ourselves out of the overall business scenario that we had got into. We had to do a really big layoff in May of 2020 on very unfortunate to do something like that and it's also an opportunity to catch up on org debt. So when we did our layoffs we not only were able to improve our org structure but we also switched from the divisional based structure I just mentioned to a purely functional structure across the entire company. So we no longer had GMs and that was what we thought would work for us and it did. So figure out when you are doing that what is the right thing to do in terms of your org debt correction. We did things like we created a single roadmap through the functional structure believe it or not we didn't have a single roadmap before that. Every team had their own roadmap and was working on their own milestones. So that's how we pulled ourselves out of the brink. It was our own reset moment but we knew where we were in our org debt scenario we also had to look at where our business was and we worked through that. This is you know not even six months later from when March of 2020 when the headlines was will we make it we were able to turn the business around after we reset our operating system and able to have a successful IPO all in the same year. Now the key point here is when I talked about the tips tip number one was be real be authentic when we did our layoffs Brian Jasky got in front of the entire company and talked about how we had outgrown our operating system we were honest that we were not operating well and what did we need to do about it tip number two that I talked about which is never compromise on the right hire even when we were in hyper growth we always had those cultural interviews we never gave up on those everyone had to go through two of them or they did not get in and tip number three always works works itself through or we did at least so I want to I want to leave you with one question today if any of the glitches that I mentioned resonate with you ask yourself how well is your operating system working today remember remember that your operating system which defines your culture is never static it's always going to evolve it's always going to change so ask yourself do I need an update today if not where am I in that journey because one day you will very soon as you grow as an organization grows change is hard you bring in a new executive that will disrupt your operating system when you have large amounts of change especially with growth your productivity actually will drop in the short term as the operating system is recalibrating and once things click you're back on track so ask yourself how well is it working what can you do leverage any of the tips that I mentioned along the way remember that you will have org debt and that's okay but keep tabs on it and with that thank you for being with me today I look forward to staying connected and thank you