Claire McDonnell and Jennifer Kim on Building an Inclusive Company Culture

Okay, so we'll just like dive into this. And I'll start by saying, you know, I've heard many successful founders, founders of later-stage companies like Dropbox and Airbnb, say that one of the most important things that they spend their time on as founders and as CEOs is building and scaling good company culture. So culture is this really nebulous concept, and so I wanted to discuss, you know, why it makes sense to think about it at an early stage and how to break this nebulous concept into more manageable kind of action items that early-stage founders can put into place.

Last year, I had about 50 conversations with founders of early-stage companies and the people at those companies who were building culture and DNI initiatives. And so I wanted to introduce everyone here on the podcast to two of the people that I thought were the most thoughtful and had done some incredible work in this space. And so I'll introduce you both.

So first, we have Claire McDonald. She's the founder of True Link, and True Link makes software; it's tech-enabled financial services for older adults. So Claire, you're at 35 employees now, and one impressive thing is that they have a woman or person of color who is leading each of the teams there. And True Link has made some incredible progress; their customer base has grown about 20x over the last three years. I spent about an hour to an hour and a half talking to Claire’s team recently, and it was really clear to me that Claire and her co-founder Kai were doing some very intentional thinking about culture and DNI at True Link. So thank you for joining us.

Claire: Thanks for having me! Very happy to be here.

And next, we have Jennifer Kim. Jennifer was one of the very first employees at Lever, a company that builds recruiting software, and she built the DNI program at Lever. Lever is about 100 employees… 150? Oh, about 150, and they have a close to about 50/50 male/female split in terms of the employees, which isn't easy. It is not an easy feat in Silicon Valley. And, you know, she is sort of one of my mentors in a lot of this. She's authored a lot of incredible resources for startups and founders who are interested in learning about DNI and culture and how to implement them in really early-stage startups.

Jennifer: Thanks for having me!

So I thought, let's just jump in. Why do you think there's so much attention around culture nowadays in the press, among founders, you know, in blog posts? People are talking more and more about culture than ever. I've always thought it's been an important thing, and in 1992, for example, there was a study by HBS and the Kotter Institute that detailed the corporate cultures of 200 companies, and they showed how good culture affects everything from, you know, long-term economic performance, employment growth, revenue growth. Companies focused on culture outperformed by a huge amount. So why is this now being talked about more commonly?

Claire: Yeah, I mean, culture can be kind of tricky to talk about, right? You ask fish about water and the response is, "What's water?" So a culture is very much how things are run. It's everything around you; it's how your team sees; it's the lens for everything your team works through. So what's hard about culture sometimes is that we kind of fall into these two traps. So often, we’re talking about, you know, what's really visible and tangible or what's really kind of stream negatives. It's on the tangible front; you know, the common misconception is that, oh, you know, we have a great culture because of this ping-pong table or happy hours, which is great, but it's actually a very, very small part of it. Your culture is all about how you hire, what kind of conversations, what's the energy of the room, how do you make decisions, who gets promoted, right? It's not always so visible, so it can be a little bit tricky to talk about. And therefore, you know, hard to manage and sometimes even hard to measure, but it doesn't mean that it's not important. And then on the second end, if you're watching the news these days, there's a lot of attention on Uber. Oh my gosh, how many articles have we all read about Uber? And that's kind of a negative example. But, you know, there are so many great companies out there really kind of quietly toiling away, working on culture, being really intentional, but it wouldn't be a very click-worthy headline. You know, employees are generally civil to each other and pretty happy with what they have in terms of culture. So it's really easy to get intimidated and like, oh gosh, like, what are we supposed to do? There's so much! We don't want to be the next Uber. But it's just like any other skill, right? If you're a founder, if you're growing a team, you know, even if you started as, say, an engineer or hacker, you're probably having to get good at sales and marketing, and culture, and being a culture leader is one of them.

So, Claire, a question for you. When did True Link start as a company?

Claire: Yes, so we started back in late 2012, early 2013.

So how has the conversation even internally at True Link changed about culture and DNI? Is it something you thought of since the very beginning, or has it sort of increased as you've grown?

Claire: We've thought about culture from the very beginning and especially about building an inclusive culture, but it seems like we think about it almost more every single day because we see the payoffs of having invested in it every single day. I think the lesson we've learned over this time, over the last five years now since we started back in 2013, late 2012, is that the way you build your culture is by small investments every single day and that rather than being a distraction from the business of running your company and from the sort of constant existential threat that you're under as a startup, the investing in your culture actually insulates you against that threat. Right? So being part of a team that trusts each other, where everyone believes they're being treated fairly and they're all in it together, that's actually how you survive—not how you distract yourself from survival.

I sort of wanted to piggyback off what you were just saying about what are some of the benefits of intentionally focusing on your culture early on? Like, what are some of the things that you've both seen from your work?

Jennifer: Well, for me, the privilege of being a founder or an early employee is that you actually get to create a new little world, a new community, a new environment. And so the benefit of creating that world in a way that doesn't necessarily replicate the dysfunction of the world outside the office doors is that you get to be a part of it. So I actually like going to work every day. I feel respected and valued. I think most members of our team feel respected and valued—or we certainly try to make it that way—and that's really great and really pleasant, actually.

Claire: That was one of the things that struck me from talking to your team. They were all very mission-driven. They said they, you know, felt respected. Every person I talked to could, you know, repeat to me what the mission of the company was and what their role was in making that happen. And they felt like a very unified team. And the thing that kept coming up over and over again was respect. They said that they focus on hiring people that respect each other, respect the elderly. The concept of respect was something that came up multiple times in my conversations with everyone.

Jennifer: And so I thought that was a really interesting thing; it’s like respect was like the major theme of the conversation for us.

Related to that, at Lever, we've seen huge benefits in terms of both recruiting and retention. So recruiting, for example, we had one QA engineer who was hired because her friend was also interviewing for that role. And he was actually underqualified—he was just a little bit underqualified—was turned down, but he loved going through the process so much, and he kind of fell in love with a little bit of Lever's culture. So when he got turned down, he actually told his friend, "Hey, you should apply," and she had more experience and she was fantastic. So I think it's really going to be a competitive advantage, right? Like, imagine every person that comes across, you know, applying with their resume or you ever interview them—they become an advocate for you. Like, what a powerful recruiting force that can be. On the retention side, you know, for a long time at Lever, we had such low attrition rates because people feel connected to the work and the people and, you know, feel proud of where they work—like Claire does.

Additionally, I think, you know, our salespeople and engineers are all great. I mean, they're getting weekly recruiter reach-outs, you know, promising them we'll give you so much more equity and here’s like how much more we can pay you. And there's always going to be companies trying to poach away your best employees, but again, they stay because they want to because they feel connected to the culture. One engineer who's been there three years, his name is Xia, he told me once, you know, technical problems—the really cool ones—will come and go. There will always be new cool things to work on, but he stays because really finding that right team and environment, like that’s truly the rare thing in Silicon Valley.

I think that's absolutely correct—that in hiring the best people and retaining them, I think culture is the biggest kind of, you know, tool that you have in the toolkit for that. Because there are so many companies, and recruiting is so hard. I mean, you've both, you know, been on that side of things, and to have, you know, people be connected to the team and to the mission, I think, is a great piece of it. That's sort of the business case for an inclusive culture, right? In addition to inclusive culture making a company a great place to be every day, fundamentally, especially at early stages, you have to create an environment where all your employees, and your most valuable employees that have your institutional knowledge, want to keep coming back to work every day. Want to ignore the emails from recruiters and want to choose your company again every day. And an inclusive culture where people are treated fairly, I think, is really the only way to make that happen.

Yeah, I feel like for a long time culture was kind of seen as a luxury, right? We need to focus on growth first and we’ll kind of like worry about that later when we're much bigger, you know, when it's not my problem anymore. But that's just not gonna fly. And because there is now so much attention on this, even externally, I think it's popping up in founders' minds much sooner than maybe it once was.

Perhaps so. These are really great examples of, you know, when you're doing culture right. These are some of the benefits; these are some of the things that you do well. But as you were saying at the beginning of a startup's life, every day is a fight for survival. So, you know, what happens if you don't think about it until later? What are some of the risks there?

Claire: Well, I think here's the thing to keep in mind: even if you do think about it all the time—as I think one of our team members told you, some members of our team think about it obsessively—you still make mistakes all the time, right? So we think about this; we invest in this, and we're really far from perfect. So as I'm thinking about all we've accomplished, also running through my mind are all the mistakes and screw-ups that we've made, right? And how, you know, I feel like the thing we're proud of is how much we care and how we're making progress every day, but nobody's perfect. So if you're not investing and trying to not make mistakes, you're probably making even more of them.

Yeah, that's a really good point because, you know, especially for folks who haven't thought a whole lot about culture or diversity and inclusion initiatives, they might think like, "Well like, you know, that's not my background; that's not what I'm good at." But it is such a critical part in that, you know, it's not as hard as you think to get started, right? If you're looking at, you know, for example, Airbnb, like, oh my gosh! Look at all the culture initiatives they have! Like, well, they're so much bigger than you and they've been going at it for a long time. So I think really lowering the stakes and kind of seeing it as a muscle to develop and practice and, yeah, it really helps to do it from the beginning so that you build good habits as an organization.

I think the key to remember is that, yeah, no one is perfect. I don't know if anyone's born an amazing culture leader. I think as long as you are authentic with your intentions and you're open and you’re really bringing in conversations and approach it as a team activity, no one person's in charge of culture. You can really do a lot together.

So let’s kind of dig into, let’s get even more specific and start digging a little bit into tactics because, you know, as we’re talking about how do we make this a muscle that we can sort of exercise and make stronger. So, you know, from day one, what are some of the things that you recommend founders do even when it's just two people in a room?

Claire: For me, the Achilles' heel of an inclusive culture is unchecked biases. So, it’s letting all the cognitive biases in our head run rampant without checking them ourselves or creating ways for our colleagues to check them. So we've introduced a variety of small things that help us check ourselves and check each other that I think make a huge difference in culture and are actually really easy to do.

Jennifer: So, like, what are some examples? Let's just leave it at that.

Claire: A big theme for checking biases for us is credit and blame. So there's a lot of research that shows that women and people of color get less credit for their accomplishments and get blamed more; or sort of, the things they screw up are remembered more.

Jennifer: Okay, so what do you do about that?

Claire: So we do a few things culturally. So one thing is we—a, how I remember it, it’s not what we actually call it—but I think of it as a "no blame" button. So in GitHub, you can click a button that basically shows you where the sort of like offending code is that caused a problem, right? Which is actually an extremely useful feature. So no hate on the blame button, but we try not to have a cultural blame button, right? So when there’s a mistake or a screw-up, what we collectively try to do, and anybody who’s available tries to do, is solve the problem—not focus on blaming someone for it. Then, only once we've solved the problem and put things in place to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again, do we reflect about how that happened and collectively work to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Otherwise, I think you can sort of fall into patterns of scapegoating and blaming people and holding things against people really easily. And if you have that as a part of your culture, it’s almost inevitable that some people are going to be targeted more than others.

Jennifer: Yeah, that's really great because, yeah, like you said, there's all these patterns. Plus, the more it happens, the less people will be to take risks, right? Because if you want to be blamed? So it sounds like you’re really setting up an environment where people can try things out, and you don’t have to have it all figured out but you’re more likely to get big wins out of that, too.

Claire: And the other side of the no blame button is actually making sure people get credit and amplifying credit where it’s due. So this was a story that came out of the Obama White House that reminded me of kind of how we’ve approached this at True Link, imperfectly, but we try. Which was, correct me if I get the details wrong—in the first year of the Obama administration, some of the women who worked there noticed that they and other women weren't getting credit for their ideas in meetings. So they started using a great strategy called amplification, which is when Cat says something in a meeting, instead of saying, “That’s a great idea,” I say, “Cat’s idea to X is a great idea,” just to make sure that everyone here is that it was Cat who said it. So we try to do things like that. We also try to make, basically, acknowledgments and shout-outs to people for the good work that they do, an important part of our culture in an ongoing way. So it’s the most popular section of all company meetings where you have a big wide open period of time where people are basically telling people about the good work that other people have done. And I think this is especially important across teams, right? So people on the engineering team are hearing about the specific accomplishments of members of the marketing team, the support team, and vice versa.

Jennifer: One thing that I wanted to ask you specifically was when I talked to your team, there was a sense that everyone felt really appreciated. So they said, you know, we're building an environment where the ops team is as respected and celebrated as the engineering team. And when you talk to a lot of companies, especially in Silicon Valley, there’s a sense that, you know, software engineering is the golden egg. Everyone, you know, is excited about the engineers and Ops kind of gets left behind. And so how did you—how do you do that? How do you create a culture where both, where all people feel as celebrated?

Claire: Well, it’s definitely an uphill battle in Silicon Valley. So this particular was sort of a bee in my bonnet and a bee in my co-founder Kai’s bonnet as well, and let me tell you why and tell me if this sort of theory makes sense to you all. I think that prizing certain teams at companies—so it used to be sales teams; now it’s engineering teams—is I think prizing certain teams is actually a coded way of prizing certain races and genders. So I think, we all know that in most companies, the majority of the engineering team are men, for example. And mad props to you if that’s not the case in your company, and you can just stop listening. But, so when you actually treat that class of employees differently than you treat everyone else—I’m not talking about kind of keeping up with market compensation; I’m talking about the way you talk to people, the perks people get, and the way leadership focuses on one team versus the other. When you treat teams differently in that way, I think what you’re actually doing is perpetuating society-wide biases about race, gender, ethnicity, and things like that. So I think unless you’ve achieved perfect diversity and your engineering team is a mirror of our society—a balance of gender and race and ethnicity and age across teams that mirror each other and mirror society at large—if you’re prizing your engineering team over everyone else, you are perpetuating biases and discriminating against folks.

Jennifer: So breaking that down a little bit, how do you make sure that the Ops team and other teams don't feel like they're less important?

Claire: So here’s the tricky part: part of this is that we authentically believe that they are not less important. So we have 99 percent customer satisfaction ratings from our support team. We have the highest Net Promoter Score I've ever seen in financial services—that's not because of the engineering team and our amazing products; that’s because of all the teams of the company and all the people and the wonderful talented people who lead those teams and who we’ve retained for multiple years because we value them. So, so specifically, we believe it. That's one thing. And I think actually it's worth founders looking in the mirror and asking themselves, "Do I believe this? Do I equally value all these teams? Do I see how they contribute to the company?" And then once you answer that question for yourself, it becomes easier to, in team meetings, to talk about that, to acknowledge the different roles of different team members. We also do sort of trainings and sessions at our team retreats to help people understand the contributions of other teams. So at our last retreat, we did a Marketing 101 and a Financial Advising 101 so people could really understand tactically what those teams do and how technical and complex and challenging it is. We also do what we call ride-alongs with our support team so engineers and other team members actually sit with the support team and listen to them engaging with folks. And after two hours of sitting with a member of our support team, you cannot help but be awed and respected by what they do. Another thing we do is when people join the company, we make sure they have coffees and lunches with people from all different teams of the company so that people really get to know each other and kind of have human relationships and respect each other as humans in addition to their roles at the company. So those are some of the things we do.

Jennifer: Some similar things too with both onboarding and kind of ongoing, so that cross-functional exposure can be so important. So for example, people used to come in to Lever as new hires saying, "Oh, you know, I’ve heard such great things about the product; it’s really awesome; it must sell itself." Right? So as part of our onboarding, we actually have every new hire, every onboarding class, watch what a real sales call looks like and then do a Q&A with a sales rep because that notion gets thrown out the window. You know, you hear how stressful it can be, the questions that get thrown at you, the frustration sometimes the sales rep has to really navigate through, but still calm, top of the game, and really push that deal forward. And then the Q&A is fascinating because every time it’s like, "Wow! like that was, like, you know, my blood was boiling listening to that call! Like, how do you handle that kind of question and that?" And over time, it really builds respect for the other function, right? So there's no room for the idea of, not to pick on engineers, but like, “I'm an engineer, so I'm better.” Like, there’s just no room for it because you understand how hard those jobs are and how it's a good self-reflection exercise for like, "Man, if I were in that role, I would probably suck at that job." And really realizing we’re all here for a reason; we have a role to play to make the entire business successful.

Claire: I love that sales idea! I’m gonna start doing that also. And that reminds me of another one of our approaches to this challenge, which is our no jerks policy. In we have a very firm no jerks policy, and every time we've violated that, it's been a really big mistake.

Jennifer: How do you know what someone’s a jerk?

Claire: Yes, good question! So, one, we put it on our job description, so we hope that helps screen people out. But also we’re basically looking for humility and respect in the hiring process. So we do this in a few different ways. We focus on times people have gotten feedback, asking them to tell us about that and how they responded to that, how they changed their behavior. We have people interact with members of a lot of different teams on different levels, and we evaluate how they treat everyone, basically.

Jennifer: That’s a really big one. And then we also discuss diversity and inclusion in our culture; we talk about our value of humility and respecting different functions, things like that. So across those things, it actually becomes pretty clear pretty quickly, and I think that’s a big factor in why our team is composed of actually all the wonderful people that it is.

Adding on to, you know, hiring for it, the no jerks policy really—the watching how candidates interact with different levels of people—can be so key. So two examples of this: our receptionists are told if, for any reason, any candidate makes you feel disrespected or there are any comments like, "Let us know right away!" So it was either me, you know, or let the recruiter know, because the person who was a little bit rude to the receptionist, you know, but comes across a super suave and confident with everybody else that might be a flag. Of course, it’s not going to be the automatic veto power, but it’s just one data point of many you’re collecting in a hiring process.

Another example I have with this is, we were hiring for a PM, a product manager, and there was this person with the perfect resume; you know, all the right schools and companies, and they just were so confident that everybody was, you know, in love with this candidate, and it looked like a pretty, you know, full speed ahead for his hiring. And when we were doing one of the hiring debriefs, one of our most junior members of the product team kind of hesitantly raised his hand and said, “Hey, like, I don’t really know how to say this—I had some weird interactions with him.” So it turned out during that conversation he, so there were three people in the room, and the most junior member felt like this candidate wasn’t ever addressing him, so would not make eye contact, would kind of talk over him, only answer questions and ask questions of the more senior PM that was in the room. So he was saying, and he feels so bad bringing it up because he wasn’t sure it was appropriate, but once he said it, it kind of made us realize, actually he is a little bit… comes across as arrogant, right? So really that distinction of someone who interviews really well versus when someone gives indicators of who they are, kind of like as a coworker, it can be like such a huge wake-up call because once we’re looking at that candidate with that lens, we started kind of remembering like, “Oh, yeah, there was that one little weird moment, or he did say this and this email kind of rubbed me the wrong way…” but we’d kind of gotten dazzled by their resume, which happens all the time.

So I think assembling interview panels across multiple levels can be really really helpful. We do something really similar and actually a really helpful tool for us in making our interview panels even more effective and really pulling out feedback from people has been Lever and using the feedback forms on Lever actually before we even get together as a group to discuss things so that everyone feels like they have—no one’s influenced by other people’s view and everyone’s sort of forced in a disciplined way to talk about the pros and cons of a candidate. And Lever's been really helpful for us in surfacing some of that. And even for me personally, I am sensitive to those cues, right? When someone's making eye contact with my co-founder and not me, and it's always a delicate balance of saying am I being oversensitive or this is a real thing? And I think actually taking that moment to reflect in front of the computer and collect the data and then compare that data to what other people submitted has just been invaluable for us.

So another thing that I think is really important is you've talked about feedback channels—making it possible for, you know, everyone to give each other feedback, and then also having hard conversations. And, you know, feedback can be difficult to give. And so how do you build it into your cultures so that you can have these really kind of uncomfortable conversations and make it okay?

Claire: So I think this is an ongoing challenge, and I actually think it’s something that’s really easy to get complacent about as either a founder or a leader or a manager or you say, “I’m getting tons of feedback. Give me feedback; they feel comfortable,” right? And so I think it’s actually really important to always be saying, “Is that true? Is that happening?” And I think one of the most valuable tools for this has been a couple things. One, we do diversity and inclusion trainings that are actually a lot about speaking out and how to speak out if there’s something that makes you uncomfortable. And I think we actually are gonna go even deeper on that because it can put people in a tough position to know like, how do I bring this up respectfully? And with whom? I think it’s modeling. So you talk to a couple of our team members who cared a lot about diversity inclusion, Paige and Isaac, and I think they model for the whole team actually bringing up issues with folks in a really respectful way. Raising issues with me and Kai sometimes in front of the whole team in a team meeting, saying, “You know, hey, did you mean to say that that way?” And I think it’s that modeling that shows like we actually all have an open conversation; this isn’t about hierarchy; it’s about respect. That is maybe one of the most powerful tools.

I think a little bit of investment into communication and almost emotional intelligence 101 can go a really, really long way. So what you might take for granted when you’re, again, five, ten people, those, when you are now 100 and 200, and you don’t have as close relationships, just investing a little bit in injecting into kind of that emotional intelligence into your culture can have such multiplier effects.

So two things that we’ve done: one, there’s this concept called nonviolent communication. Amazing tool, terrible name—nonviolent communication. What does that mean? So another alternative name for that is called compassionate communication. It's a style and kind of a practice of communication that is rooted in empathy, and about self-expression, and about these human emotional needs that we all have. But sometimes, in the fast-paced business setting, it can kind of get glossed over, which makes misunderstanding or judgment a lot more likely. So we've run a couple of workshops on that. Another one that’s been really helpful for us is one called Colors. There are a ton of these kind of personality assessments out there and all have their pros and cons, but what we liked about Colors is that it helps give people a framework for individual differences and kind of stylistic communication differences—why someone is really, you know, why someone might be really drawn to this kind of project, whereas I get motivated by this, which is different than this. So when you join Lever, you take this, you know, short test, and it tells you what color energy from this, you know, rainbow circle you’re leading with and kind of what you are drawn to and what your strengths are. It gives us people this basic framework for understanding yourself, and then therefore, once you become a more confident understanding yourself, you become a lot more tolerant of others' differences.

Piggybacking off of the idea of, you know, modeling, I have seen that it does make a huge difference when the founders of the exec team are really honest and open about, you know, the mistakes they’ve made because this is, you know, tricky territory. Culture and DNI and all these conversations are really tough to have. And so I think it’s always great when, you know, founders can be open with their team about mistakes, and that makes, I think, a lot of people feel more open about sharing their own or realizing that a lot of mistakes aren’t intentional. So in that sort of frame of mind, I'll share a mistake that I've made here at YC and then, if, you know, not all this stuff, as you said, Claire, you're not perfect; you know, you don’t have the silver bullet; you don’t have—no company has all the answers. So I think for me, one of the mistakes I made is at YC: we run the female founders conference, and we are in our fifth year. You know, it's a conference where over a thousand women come, and we made it about three or four years and realized we never had a mother's room. So this is a thousand women, and we didn’t have any accommodations for women who had just given birth who needed to take time in a private setting to pump their breast milk. And for me, I, you know, don’t have children, and I don’t have that experience; it didn’t even occur to me that was just something you even needed. And so, you know, one of the attendees reached out and pointed it out and said, you know, it’s something that she would have very much appreciated. It was super distracting for her to sort of run around the building looking for a place to go. And it just made me realize that without a diversity of perspectives and experiences on the team, you know, you just miss out on a lot of different things that you need to make, you know, to start building in a culture that includes all kinds of people.

And so I would love to hear a story. Do you have a specific story where, you know, a mistake that you've made, something that you wish you could get a do-over on, you know, something that you know you hope others will learn from?

Claire: I think another blind spot for me and for a lot of early-stage founders is the fact that you actually—you have to play a lot of different roles at the company, right? So, for example, I’ve always taken care of the HR function, right? So in addition to being people's supervisor in terms of their work performance, I’m also the first thing they have to come talk to about a benefits issue, right? Or a family issue. And I think that actually puts people in a pretty hard situation, and seems actually like an intractable challenge, right? If you're like, "Well, it's a five-person team; who else are they gonna talk to?" But what I’ve realized recently is that it’s as simple as saying, “Hey, if you have questions about this or issues about this, here’s two to four other people you can talk to.” Right? It doesn’t have to be me. Or like, “If you have a problem with me, here are some other members of the team that you can talk to.” And we’re lucky to have this strong set of leaders, right? But it’s literally as simple as saying one sentence, and it basically makes the problem go away. When you’re running a startup, things are moving so quickly; things are changing constantly. You really underestimate how confusing it might be if you’re a person that’s joining for the first time and you're trying to figure out your job and everything culture around it, right? So I found, yeah, really writing things down, really investing in onboarding has gone such a long way.

Well, you don’t want to happen, and that’s all the mistakes that we’ve made—not making some of the expectations clearer so people feel like they have to guess or they're wondering. They're sitting there, I mean like, "Am I doing this right?" and leaving, you know, sometimes losing good candidates or good employees because they were like, "Look, like, I need a little bit more explicit guidance," and realizing, "Wow, we could have done just a little bit more to make their confusion really elevated," right? So when you're running a company, it’s hard, but just a little bit of investment into writing things down—explicit communication—goes such a far way.

Jennifer: I completely agree. I think I’ve learned that lesson over and over again, and it still might not have fully sunk in, but it’s so true, right? Of saying, “Hey, I think we have an implicit policy about this thing. Maybe if I took 45 minutes and wrote that down and put it on our internal wiki, I wouldn’t answer 30 questions about it over the course of six months,” right? Where it’s this little upfront investment that actually saves a lot of time and confusion. And if I'm getting 30 questions, that means that was 30 employees who were actually probably thinking about it and tried to find the answer and wasted a bunch of time before they came to me or other folks with the question. And once that’s written down, then you can invite more discussion and questions to help make it better, right? But if it’s in your head, no one can figure it out, so we’re all just kind of trying to figure out what you mean.

So writing things down, you know, investing in an intranet where you write down policies, over-communicating during your, whatever, weekly or bi-weekly all-hands can be really helpful.

So I wanted to go over some of your favorite resources, so founders want to learn more about culture, and we didn’t even get to dig into D&I much at all, but if they wanted to start reading on it, what are some of your, you know, your favorite pieces that you might recommend?

Claire: I would say one of the things that I loved reading is Jennifer wrote a piece that was called "50 Ideas for Workplace DNI that You Can Start Today," and we can link to it in our blog, but I think it’s a four—it’s, you know, sort of a primer or, you know, it's 50, you know, easy things that you can implement to, you know, at an early-stage company. And so, you know, to start things off is one of the things that I would recommend and folks take a look at.

Jennifer: The three resources I would recommend are, first of all, Facebook has an online training called managing bias that’s basically about well managing bias. So it’s an inclusion training, and one of our team members, Isaac, has adapted that training for the company and given it in a few different ways, and it’s a great resource, and it makes preparing a training about a very complex topic much faster and easier. Or you could just do it yourself; it’s really interesting and edifying and all online.

Another place where we’ve gotten a lot of resources focused on inclusion in particular is the Kaper Capital’s founders' commitment. So the founder's commitment is a pledge that early-stage startups take to commit to taking small but meaningful actions that relate to diversity and inclusion. A lot of incredible companies are a part of it, and they've put together a ton of great resources that make it easier to make simple, easy moves on a lot of this stuff. So I really recommend checking that out and considering joining. And then finally, I love First Round Review; they have a lot of incredible pieces on culture and inclusion written by people who have accomplished really impressive things on these fronts. So there's probably like 15 different pieces on there that have been really helpful for me.

Claire: Yeah, I would agree with all those. I’d probably add on one more project: Project Include—projectinclude.org is an organization, a non-profit founded by a bunch of really amazing women with years of experience in Silicon Valley. They’ve seen it all, so they came together to put together these recommendations ranging from hiring to culture to measuring everything that you want to do to follow to make sure you’re building right scaffolding, the right foundation to build the right culture from the very early days. So I recommend every founder that they at least read for once because you're gonna learn so much from it.

Jennifer: Awesome! Is there anything else that you guys wanted to hit on?

Claire: So one other thing that is challenging but important from an inclusivity perspective is, um, well, it’s basically just like interruptions and interrupting in meetings and how that perpetuates power dynamics. Basically, I find this really hard because I'm a huge interrupter. Maybe I should constantly be recording and have microphones in front of my face, but I think that when I think there’s some simple ways to reduce people interrupting each other in meetings, right? So you can, like, assign somebody for each meeting as the interruption police whose job is stopping that. You can just remind people with one sentence on the wall, but if you want a quick and easy way to not replicate bias and weird power dynamics, slowing down interruptions at your company is a good way to do that.

If you're any kind of team leader, really understanding DNI is all about paying attention to those people who are more perceptive and more effective than the average person by some of the systemic inequalities and obstacles. So if anything, they're just trying to give you information and better signal. So here’s what we should work on together because if you ship the right programs and make the right improvements, it’s only going to end up helping your entire company, but it’s gonna benefit everyone! The saying goes, "A rising tide lifts all boats." So I really think that's what sustainable culture building and DNI is all about—it's not us versus you; it’s not you get this and I get that. It really is about how do we just build better companies, and we will all benefit from that.

My last question for both of you is going to be, you know, what's one thing that you would recommend founders and team builders do, you know, if they want to start thinking intentionally about culture and D&I from day one?

Claire: You know, I think there’s an infinite number of initiatives and programs—you can google them; you have plenty of ideas to get started. I think one thing we’re not talking about nearly as much is, you know, this conversation around how do you learn to become a better culture leader, right? So I can kind of give like one ongoing thing and one short-term thing. So what I really love about, you know, YC is really great about giving this advice and really drilling it down to the founders: take care of yourself; get sleep, exercise, make sure you should make sure you’re taking breaks, spend time with friends and family. I think this is really important because even though there's all this pressure around, you know, crazy growth and 10x-ing yourself, at the same time, it’s nearly impossible to be a really great culture leader if you’re burnt out. If you don’t, if you’re running on fumes because to really build culture, in a thoughtful way, you need to kind of embody the spirit of almost generosity and deep caring for your people, right? Like Claire, I know you’re doing that because the things that your employees are saying— they wouldn’t be saying it if you didn’t really deeply care for your team and they didn’t know it, you know what I mean?

So really remembering that if you want to build a great culture, start with yourself, right? Making sure—make sure you’re taken care of; you can’t do the job without you being okay. And then maybe a little bit more a short-term thing, you know, DNI and culture—it can sometimes be like “Oh, that’s not my thing; that's not my area of expertise.” Why not, right? Like culture is everyone’s business, especially if you’re part of any team, and it’s doubly especially if you’re any kind of leader, right? So I really encourage everyone to think about what can I do to really show everyone that I’m learning about this and I care about it and encourage others to care about it too. Right? Maybe sure this podcast was your team, or a blog post that you really like, share it on Twitter— it’ll be a good break from all the crypto you’re tweeting about. I think a really good way to do is, you know, share something just a couple sentences on like, “Here’s what I’ve learned,” and invite others to, “What did you learn? What did you agree with? What resonated? Maybe what do you think we should start doing?” I think it’s a really great invitation for a conversation about culture and showing that I’m learning and I want you to learn with me; we’re gonna do this together.

Claire: So my two pieces of advice are: one, figure out why you care about this and what you care about specifically, right? So what motivates you when it comes to inclusion? What motivates you when it comes to culture? And the second piece—and this is really building on what Jen was saying—is empowering members of your team. So at True Link, it’s actually members of our team who aren’t me and Kai. I’ve mentioned a couple of them this podcast, Isaac and Paige, and other people who I think are some of the real leaders at the company around building an inclusive culture. And that’s happened because they’re empowered to be leaders at the company because we’ve talked about it, because we share values. And so I think it’s really sort of like having those conversations and opening it up so other people can be leaders. And that’s especially helpful when you are burnt out and tired and not taking care of yourself, and you're not really at your best. Like, it’s cool to know that I can rely on other folks to play that leadership role and to build the culture we want even when I’m not having my most energetic day or my priority list is so long I can’t get to those things that I wanted to focus on.

Jennifer: And that’s great, and I think it has to come from the founders; like, the founders have to empower, you know, other people to do that. I mean, it’ll come from them, but then also give people the autonomy and the power to, you know, take that role. And that’s something I think that was beautiful about what, you know, Lever did and what you did there is that, you know, you really owned that piece as Lever grew.

Claire: Yeah, I really feel like I was given this really great opportunity from the Lever founders like, "Hey, run with it; go with it." And what started as it's like a very tiny kind of a couple of in-person conversations grew into this large brand and a number of initiatives and Lever really becoming known as, well, the company that’s embracing DNI, right? When I started at almost four years ago, I could have—I could have never predicted that this is how it’s going to turn out. But when you know, like Claire said, founders are authentic about why they care and they empower others to do it, it can have this like really magical multiple creative effect.

Very cool! Well, thank you, guys!

Jennifer: Thank you!

Claire: Thank you, Kat!