Culture Clash

Company culture, like almost everything else, is accelerated and concentrated in Silicon Valley.?Culture, and, by association, brand,?is so important and prevalent, you could almost test it like Rorschach — Hold up a name of a company to a user and they’ll immediately know what it stands for. Facebook: The Hacker Way. Twitter: Birds. Google: Nerds. Apple: Good Design. Square: Minimalism. TechCrunch: Startups, etc. This association thing happens on the less positive side of the spectrum as well.?Yahoo! We don’t know. Aol? Oh well, we’ll see. Culture is so important for an organization because it engenders focus and influences hiring — Talent is our arsenal for battle against both our competitors and the bigger players. As Paul Graham writes in “What Happened To Yahoo!” “The company felt prematurely old. Most technology companies eventually get taken over by suits and middle managers. At Yahoo it felt as if they’d deliberately accelerated this process. They didn’t want to be a bunch of hackers. They wanted to be suits. A media company should be run by suits.” First of all, the more the “Are we a tech (hacker) company or a media (suit) company?” debate is allowed to rage unchecked both internally and externally, the more a company seems to lose its way. Second, this debate is annoying — Because it’s a tautological argument, everybody usually has a different opinion (Is Facebook a tech company? Is Path?).?The truth is you can be a media company with a hacker state of mind, or vice versa, like Yahoo pre-Mayer. Culture is complicated. I’ve seen this first hand as an observer of the different media fiefdoms within Aol. At 5:30pm on a Wednesday employees from The Huffington Post?are downstairs playing ping pong; TechCrunch (Which is, as far as I’m concerned, an autonomous skunkworks within Aol, and also a tech company because of Crunchbase) never sleeps — okay, almost never sleeps. It’s Sunday, and I’m at the office, mostly because I still consider TC a “startup that covers startups.” The only thing that’s changed is we’re now owned by a big something — A fact that we do our best to ignore culturally. Because big somethings tend to slow stuff down: At a thriving tech startup, there are very few petty political squabbles, everybody is too focused on survival and everybody has way too much work to do. “Every person can wake up knowing that the work they

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