Why leadership is so important in setting startup culture – consciously and implicitly
I just read Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang. It was both eye-opening and cringe-worthy. The book explores the role of gender in the tech industry – at startups and venture capital firms – and the interaction between men and women in the two. While Silicon Valley has grown to have global influence, in many ways the cultural leadership from the venture community has dramatically shrunk in the last decade. Chasing deal flow has resulted in many VCs leading the race to the bottom when it comes to startup ethical behaviour.
Among other things, the book reminded me how important leadership is in setting startup culture – both consciously and implicitly.
Here was the day I got that lesson.
With the reckless and naïve abandon of founders who had no clue what they were about to tackle, we had just started Ardent, a supercomputer company. Ben Wegbreit, vice-president of engineering (he was one of my mentors and then my co-founder of Epiphany), broke his foot skiing just as the company started. So every day, he hobbled into our very small office nattily dressed in his suit but wearing sneakers over his cast. (Yes, in the dim past of Silicon Valley the execs really did wear suits.)
At first the company just consisted of the founders, but Wegbreit soon started to hire his engineering team. Since this was the pre-hoodie era, they interviewed in various types of then-engineering attire – most with jeans, some with khakis, etc. (And, back then, they were all men.) But as each engineer was hired and started work, I began to notice that after a few days they started to wear suits … wait for it … with sneakers. Obviously, this was a pretty bizarre fashion statement then – and no one had sent out a memo announcing this as the engineering dress code. After six weeks of furious staffing and recruiting, Wegbreit had a team of 10 or so engineers and I have vivid memories of all of them trying to look like him.
Yet he was oblivious to the suit-and-sneaker clone army he had created.
With my now-decades of hindsight, I realize I should have just let the engineers know that Wegbreit had broken his foot and that there was no attempt at sartorial innovation. But I remember just being mesmerized by this lesson in implicit leadership unfolding before me.
I knew that the cast was going to come off, and Wegbreit would show up one day wearing regular shoes. What I didn’t know was what would happen to the engineering dress code then – would they all adopt suits and shoes? Drop the suits all together? Keep their suit-and-sneaker style?
And how long would the change in engineering dress take? A day? A week?
And then it happened. Wegbreit showed up wearing a suit and shoes.
I’m sure engineering productivity took a big hit that week as cognitive dissonance set in. Some of the engineers went home at lunch and changed – some into shoes, some dropping the whole suit. Most started wearing regular shoes the next day, and by the second day no one was wearing sneakers.
Decades later, Mark Zuckerberg would run the experiment at scale.
Lessons learned
• Culture gets set both explicitly with rules and implicitly by example
• The bro culture of the Valley is a failure of leadership – by VCs who should know better and by CEOs who need to be taught
• Ironically, it would take a Los Angeles VC, Mark Suster at Upfront Ventures,and the Inclusion Clause, to lead the change in venture capital culture.
Steve Blank launched the Lean Startup movement. His work has changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught and how existing companies and the U.S. government innovate. A version of this column was originally posted on steveblank.com.