Core Values in Startups: Hiring, Scaling and Culture That Works

Founders talk about values all the time. But do they actually drive growth?

In this episode of Peer Effect, James Johnson speaks with Allison Kopf, CEO of TRACT, about how to turn company values into real operating principles that improve hiring, retention and performance.

Allison shares practical frameworks for building mission-driven teams, running values workshops, hiring for cultural alignment and scaling culture from startup to Series A and beyond. This conversation is packed with actionable advice for founders who want to build high-performing teams and scale faster.

You will learn:
 • Why values should shape strategy and execution
 • How to hire using a values-based interview process
 • Mission-driven vs mercenary founders
 • When to refresh company values as you scale
 • How to embed values into performance reviews and OKRs
 • Practical steps to run a values workshop with your team

If you are scaling a startup and want your team rowing in the same direction, this episode is for you.

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Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi, I'm James Johnson, founder and CEO coach. Welcome to Peer Effect, the podcast where your peers will tell you what's unlocking their 10 million plus business. Do values just mean doing an exercise and sticking them up on a wall? If not, how do you truly live them and what's the benefit? My guest today, Alison Kopf, is the CEO of TRACT. They provide enterprise supply chain intelligence for food and agriculture. They recently did an 18.6 million Series A, and Alison previously founded and sold Artemis to AI Company Unit. This is the episode for you if you want to connect your values to your strategy and operating methods. So, Allison, welcome to the show. Thanks, James. Thanks for having me. Well, today we're going to talk about sort of values. But before we jump into that, you did something pretty cool when you were 19, I understand, to do with a global competition.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yeah, you know, I got this really unique opportunity that doesn't really exist anymore. But the Department of Energy used to host a global competition where universities could participate and you had to design, build, and finance and market a fully functional, sustainable home. And it was an amazing, amazing opportunity. We actually had to build the houses on campus, break them down, ship them to Washington, DC, rebuild them on the national mall, and then you host this like two-week decathlon. That was an amazing opportunity. So you get to you learn about all kinds of stuff. You learn about technology and deep dives. We actually built an app, not to date ourselves a little bit, but we built a home controls app that was in the first, one of the first apps in the marketplace for the first time for the iPhone. You meet university students from all around the world who are thinking about sustainability challenges in totally different ways. So totally inspiring, amazing experience. Highly recommend experiential learning if you can while you're in your university. And definitely, yeah, definitely a 10 out of 10 experience.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Did you get to keep the house? Is that so that now topped in your color?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

I wish. I wish it was like a multi-million dollar house. So I wish I had that asset. No, it's actually on the university campus. I went to Santa Clara University. And if anybody goes to visit, you can actually see the house that we built. It's right next to the library, and it's now used as an engineering lab. So engineering students can kind of go in and tinker on all the projects and kind of learn how to deploy things in a scaled environment.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Wow. They're quite cool, those universities. When I was at uni, I did a this sounds very sad, a management consultancy competition at Austin University, which is sponsored by Dell.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

That was awesome at the time.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

It was so much fun. Like sort of all these sort of students from like Barclay and University of Hong Kong and sort of Norway, I had like three days to his pitch for Dell picture, which he which Michael Dev actually adjudicated of like future direction of Dell. It was quite fun.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, it's they give you a lot more power than you probably are deserving. Again, 19, we were raising raising millions of dollars. We had to go through the city of San Jose, had to permit the house. Like we had to go get building permits because it's a house. Uh yeah, things that again, no, you would never have to do unless you were doing that professionally. And so it was a really incredible teaching opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

It's kind of something sometimes you just don't know what you don't know actually helps at that stage. Like if someone said to you now, okay, go and build a million dollar house and you'd get the zoning people, I'm not doing that. That's just going to take way too much work. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

But that's a it's a startup lesson, right? Like this is you, you can like one of the things I often look for on the investment side is founder market fit. And it's something that I live really deeply in all the businesses I build is there are things like I've spent my entire career now in the same industry continuously learning and opening up new doors within that same space, but it's all within the same industry in food and ag more broadly. But there is this beauty to naivete, right? Like if you don't know something, the amount that you can kind of come at it, the angles that you can come at it, the solutions you bring to the table are gonna be naturally different than if you are that deep domain expert. And so it's it's nice to balance those two pieces wherever you can, both in yourself, but probably also in your team. You know, bring people with different backgrounds to the table, bring keep yourself continuously learning, especially in today's day and age, you can literally exponentially learn every day. So keeping yourself kind of in spaces that you feel uncomfortable because you're not the domain expert, but also being in the room where you are the domain expert and kind of trying to pair those together always refreshes to make sure you have at least thought of things from different perspectives, and that gives you the best solution in always.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

I think providing you willing to be patient to take a little bit longer to get there.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

I think sometimes or you get there faster, right? Like if you don't know the rules, the building permit's a good example, then maybe you don't do it. That's a bad example because you should probably get a permit, at least in the States. But but in startup world, right? The the move fast and break things is fundamentally that principle. Is you know, just try stuff, go out, learn. Yes, you're gonna fail, yes, you're gonna break things, but you you fundamentally the best thing that we have as a startup compared to every other major corporation out there is speed. So, yes, some things may take a little bit longer because you're learning along the way, but you are probably moving the small things forward much faster.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Yeah, that's very true. Well, we we were particularly gonna talk about values today, and it feels like there's there's been a theme or so you've been very focused, aligned with the businesses that you've been starting. But it's see, it feels like you put values at the heart of anything that you're doing. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Yeah, a very mission-driven founder, definitely. So values have always been personally important to me, and as a result, always kind of mirrors through in the companies I build.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

And so, how does that practically sort of impact the business or shape the way that you that you are a founder?

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Yeah, that's a good question. So I think you know, startups, you can approach it from a few different perspectives. You can be a very missionary, you can be a very mercenary. There's probably a spectrum of things, but that's generally the thinking. And I remember actually talking to a founder, this is a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago or so. I was probably in the early stages of my first company. And I was, we were having lunch, and he was like, Look, I I'm I've got this long laundry list of topics for something that I'm gonna build. Uh and I said, Okay, but which one do you care about? And he's like, it doesn't matter, like whichever one makes me the most money. It's like that's awesome. That's a cool personality to have. It's a very cool mentality to have. It just fundamentally did not grok with how I think of things. Because if I'm gonna do this for 10, 20, 30 years and put in the amount of effort it takes to be a startup founder, which fundamentally, right, everybody listening to this who who started a company should know like if we're slightly masochistic, it's it's not an easy journey we're going down, right? It's a really hard uphill battle. So if you're gonna take this Sisophean kind of approach to life, then it has to at least be something you're excited about every day, right? Like wake up, be fired up to come, to come in and to work on this, to work on this in your evenings, to give it your all, to not quit when when things get hard. Like that is something that if you don't have a mission behind you, to me, I can't probably keep that push going. So for me personally, it's always been something that I've been really lucky, I know that, to align kind of the mission with my career path. But being really passionate about the space I'm in and the change we can make and the things we can do is really exciting to me. And so naturally, how that translates into the business is that I try to hire people who are in that same capacity, right? We don't tend to have mercenary personalities come into our company. We tend to have people who are very mission-driven, who, you know, for lack of a better terminology, are drinking the Kool-Aid around whatever it is that we're doing, because they're also getting out of bed every day, hopefully really fired up by the things that we're doing. Because it's not just hard for us as founders, it's hard for everybody in an early stage company. That scale journey that we're all on is like life-changing in the way that you think about things. So I think that's really important. And then again, practically how it materializes is we, I always at every company I've ever built, have a really practical way to think about some of these things. So always instill a set of core values that is not top-down, it's bottoms up, it's kind of cross, you know, built built from the team that we are, that is not just platitude sitting on a wall. It's it's built into and ingrained into everything that we do on a daily basis. So that's something that's really important practically to us. Again, it materializes in hiring, of course, performance reviews, ultimately firing, right? Those, those instances, all the instances around performance management and thinking about that have to kind of fully encapsulate core values. Uh, having really strong thinking around how your OKRs or goal setting system and your strategy both match up to your mission and vision. So, again, it's not just an exercise you do once and never think about again. It's something you're constantly pushing to think about how you achieve. Those are all pieces that fit into that day-to-day narrative when you are a mission-driven company.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

So it doesn't stop when you sort of paint them on the wall. But how would you bring, let's say in the hiring process, how would you bring your values, how do you excavate sort of whether someone has the same values as you during the hiring process?

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Yeah, there's a few ways we do it at track. So one thing, again, I think an interview process is a mutual process. So I think first of all, you have to come into it from that perspective, and that's especially important during a core values interview because these aren't just about finding people who resonate with our core values, it's the reverse is true as well. So I think first of all, making sure you approach it from this way and giving candidates the option out, frankly, if they if they like they don't have to sell us on our core values. They're there are core values for a reason. It's more about finding that that mutual kind of fit. And so that's important. The other thing that's important before you get into an interview step is making sure that your values are somewhat controversial. I think this was some advice that I got a few companies ago that I that really resonated with me, which was if you just have non-controversial core values, they don't actually appeal to anyone because just saying things like be good or something like this, right? That'd be sure. Great. I am I'm excellent, I believe in excellence too. And so, you know, having something controversial, there every good core value should have a trade-off to it that that should set some people to say, yeah, that's not for me. That's actually not what I believe. And it might be in the wording of the value itself, but it actually may be in a broader description. So it's important with for us when we interview that we're not just sharing like five values, we're sharing the kind of behind the scenes of how that impacts your day-to-day. So that's something that we do in our interview process. And then we actually have a core values interview where we've developed kind of a rubric of questions that help to see if there's alignment on core values by asking for examples of how that impacts their day-to-day. And again, within a professional setting. So just giving kind of work examples for how you have done something. So feedback is something that's really important to us. Well, I want to know how you give feedback. How have you given feedback to appear in the past? How have you give me an example where you took feedback the wrong way? Why did you take feedback the wrong way? What was like what was the thinking behind that? What did it was it that you took it personally? Was it that the feedback was poorly delivered? Okay, great. What's a good structure for how to give feedback? And and it's again, not to say that that candidate's way of thinking exactly has to align with our thinking, but it does help us understand if we give uh feedback in one way and they give feedback in one way and they're total mismatches. That's interesting to us, right? It's just an interesting data point in an interview. And I think the last piece is that you have to also be careful. I think core values and culture hiring can be a poor example to filter people out sometimes as well, because it can be you can really easily quickly fall into this trap of like homogeny. And so you're yeah, unconscious bias and homogeny, and like though that's not what you're trying, at least that's not what we're trying to do with with a core values interview. It's really practical about the way that we do work here. So go back to the mission-driven attitude that people have. I'm looking for people who wake up every day fired up to overcome the challenges that we're gonna naturally face as a startup. Well, if I'm looking for that person, then I have to give them a work environment that allows them to do the best work they can do. And that is how we match on core values, less so than on like the cultural social elements of it. It's more about does this will this person thrive? Will this person do their best work, knowing the work environment we have?

SPEAKER_00 14:05

So what's really nice about that is you're you're attaching the values not just to let's sit in a room and talk about what makes us feel connected. It's like this is our strategic mission, this is what we're trying to achieve. Yes, there's what we believe in as people, but what if how where where are those joined together? What are the sort of the three to five things that mean if this is what we're aiming to do, this is how we need to operate, which means this is what our values need to be? Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 14:30

100%, yeah. And I can give you another example, right? Which is we have a value that's simplify and ship. Okay, not that controversial in a startup, but controversial if you're coming from a corporate, for example, because you're gonna sacrifice a lot of things to go faster. Uh, but it is rooted in this simplification piece. So if you are a person, and we've had people, right, where you really value established process, you really value documentation, you really value some of these things, the chances that you're probably gonna thrive in our work culture is maybe not as high as you would in another environment. We we thrive in a bit of chaos, right? And and unstructured work. That's not to say that that person can't thrive. Maybe they actually are hugely additive to us because they actually add a new layer of documentation we didn't have before. That's a good thing. As companies scale, they need more structure, right? So it's not to say that that person can't thrive, but maybe if they're performing, if if they start to see, oh, two, three, four of these values I'm not actually heavily aligned with, yeah, then maybe that's a case where they won't thrive.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Well, I mean, you've obviously you've sort of raised your series A, you've gone through the sort of the startup phase, you're in the scaling phase. Did you adjust your values when you moved into scaling phase? Because like let's say simplifying, simplifying shit might not work when you get to series C, series D, because they need more bureaucracy. So, and it feels like you need different ways of operating in startup versus scale up. So, was have have your values worked in both stages? It's a really good question.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

So we have we have not, but we have the space two, is maybe our our caveat. Like we we've always said that these are not fixed in stone. It's written into our process that they're not fixed in stone, and if there's a reason to reevaluate, we should. Do you reflect your core values as your team is today, as you are today as an organization, or do you reflect today the working contract with a bit of where you might want to go? And we chose to do that route. And again, a bit controversial because if you're if you're trying to push yourselves too aspirational, then you set the danger that they're not actually implementable on a daily basis because you're not quite there, right? You're not, it's too far away. So you can't stretch too far, in my opinion, in the future or too ambitious, but you can have some aspiration in there, so such that you can say between seed and series A, series B, are we going to be all that different in our philosophy? Hopefully not. To your point, maybe series C, D start pre-IPO. That's another kind of chunk. And then you kind of post either IPO or in preparation for acquisition or cash flow positive, depending on where you're going as a business, might be a totally different attitude. So I do think that companies should have flexibility to adjust core values and not treat them as set in stone. But you do also want them to hold steady for a long enough period of time that they're not something you're constantly refreshing, because then you don't have direction.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

I just really like this connection of the values to the what you're trying to achieve and how you're trying to achieve it, which is not something that I've I've heard before. And it's I just were founders. You kind of have the startup mode and scale-up mode, and scale mode is for shorthand, like founder moving to CEO is kind of the scale-up phase. And if founder tries to be a CEO in the startup phase, it's not gonna work because it just needs to be you just need to be hands-on and in the purpose, yeah. I'm just wondering if values, it sounds like they don't, but I wonder whether values are as clearly linked to modes of behavior between startup and scale up the same to the same level.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

It depends on how you use them, right? So for us, we've established core values as essentially a social contract between employees about how the work culture works. So if you're I I think you're right in your thinking to some degree, right, that you'd fundamentally need different either people or different skill sets. It could be people, but it could be skill sets during those sort of phases. There are delineated phases. So one founder becomes CEO is a good one, but also the people you need in that scrappy phase are going to naturally be either different or grow up into a scale-up or post-scale-up even kind of phase. So, yes, your social contract may change then at that point, right? Because the the ways of working together, your agreement with each other of how we're gonna work might change. But it may not, right? So something like if if feedback is a core value to your organization, something around feedback, be word at something, but let's say feedback is something that's really important to you. And so how you give feedback is really, really laid out and done in a specific way, that may not be something that changes, right? Because you're saying that feedback is something that's fundamentally important to us as an organization. We're gonna continue to get give it. It's gonna be done in a direct way or in this capacity. And so the tactics of how you execute on that core value may change. Your templates, your process may change, but maybe the philosophy and the core, it's a core value for a reason. Maybe that core doesn't change. But the other thing I'll add is oftentimes in that, like if you're replacing the founder as CEO, that may also trigger a refresh because then for better or for worse, core values do oftentimes reflect the founders because they're the ones fundamentally, like in the early days, building building the company culture and should, right? You should proactively steer the culture. But if you're replacing the founders uh in a company, that may probably trigger a core value refresh as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Well, that leads on to a really nice talk about you, this is not your first company. You have been sort of successful as ARC. Have the core values of each company you've sort of founded been the same, or have they shifted as you've shifted?

SPEAKER_01 21:09

They have been different. Some have been the same, certainly. That that's probably not surprising. So yeah, my my first company, we did a set of core values. We went through an acquisition, and that company had a set of core values, and when we merged the businesses, we kind of went through a refresh where we had to bring the businesses together. And then this company, which I'm not the founder of, I'm actually the CEO brought in, but it's uh it's a joint venture between four corporates. So it's a little, it's radically different structure than kind of a ground up startup. We went through a refresh when I came on board to reset kind of core values. So I've done a number of different core values exercises over the years, over the last few years in particular. And some of our core values have been similar throughout, but actually some have been radically different based on the companies that we're building. So my first company, one of our core values that I I loved was that we're a team, not a family, because I think really healthy to kind of establish guidelines on this, right? Yeah. And it was something that we felt really at the time our team felt really strongly that, like, don't call this a family. It's not a family. We're here to, first of all, we're here to win. And so, as, you know, teams, athletic teams, right? That they kind of core to what we were thinking is like we are a team. That also means we're going to establish high performance, right? We're going to really focus on this kind of element of winning, not bad, like without the expectation that we're going to call ourselves a family and have those expectations. When we merged with another company, their culture was radically different, right? And so a lot of the their like protect each other as a family was actually fully ingrained into their culture. So interesting dynamic from an acquisition standpoint, all positive but interesting. But they were they were different, right? And and here we don't have that value, but not because it wasn't important. It just wasn't the most critical social contract to establish. So there were different things that were in that radically important category for this group.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

I mean, I just quickly, I 100% agree on the not family thing. I mean, like, you can't fire your family. It sets up a whole range of unhealthy expectations. It leads this collision between like founder, company, team, into this kind of one mess. It's it's slightly culty as well, I think.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Um Yeah, I don't mind a culty for what it's worth. If only because a slight culty, not heavy culty, not true culty, not big C culty, but a slight cult. Because it is like star to star, right? Where I'm wearing a hoodie. We're we're that is a culty behavior to some degree. And if we don't deeply believe we're gonna be irrationally successful, which is what startups are, then what are we doing here, right? That's the motivation for all of us. So I do think there's a slight undertone of culty to some degree in startup world. But you're you're you're spot on for what I agree with as well, is you know, you can't fire your family even as if you want to sometimes. But actually, having worked on kind of a the other side culturally, I I see the benefits of there are benefits out there for the other side as long as it's managed in a healthy capacity and in a respectful capacity. So that's a good example though of where having a controversial value is important, right? There, those are two different cultures. They're choices you can make and they are different cultures with different expectations. And I, as an employee, am going to gravitate naturally towards one of those. I'm not gonna be in probably both camps.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Yeah, I would definitely have joined you with those values. I've just seen that that family thing do so much damage to founders as well, because it's sets them like I need to protect my team. You made bad choices too paternalistic, maternalistic. It's just it don't you stray away from accountability. It's 100% just unhealthy, I think, on both sides.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Yeah, you drag decisions out too long, which is not good for anybody. Yeah, it's it's it's I agree that I think you can see it be really unhealthy for the business as well as the people within it.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Yeah. So for the founders listening, what is a really good way to do this values exercise? Because you've clearly spent a lot of time thinking about it. You've done it a few times. If someone's to go and do it to go and do this with their team today, what is a good way of doing it?

SPEAKER_01 25:40

I think first, first I'd say don't make it a top-down exercise because it'll never take off, right? Values are something so personal to people that you have to involve them in the process. If you wanted to A, shape the organization for what it is, because you've for better or for worse, you have people on your team, presumably at this point. If you don't, that's a different conversation. But if you have people on your team, you want to reflect that group. You brought people on on purpose. Presumably, they bring something valuable to the table that you want to mirror throughout the organization in some way, shape, or form. So, so some of the things that I've done that are really, really successful in this camp are first of all, dedicate enough time for it. I think trying to do it while you're doing 17 other things is just never going to give it the impact that you want it to have. So you want to make sure you have the actual space to do it, the time to do it, the headspace, frankly, to do it. This is something we as founders really struggle with. We're always context switching. We're quite literally always doing 10 things at once, right? Which I think the maximum you can actually think about is two or something, maybe max three. And so, really giving it the space that it needs, the headspace that it needs to be proper kind of focus is important. And so, if if you think about it from there, like organize a two-day workshop, a three-day workshop, whatever it is, however much time you think is appropriate based on your size of your business and how many people are involved. And it could be on site, it can be off-site. I think there's different pros and cons to that to again clear your headspace a little bit, but you can do it in either of those scenarios. And then set up a really structured space for how to think about it in both a structured and unstructured way, right? So making sure that you have activities that allow people to diverge, but then also have space to kind of converge in throughout the workshops. So you might have an exercise where you're asking people to define a core value that defines them in a preferred professional way, but what's your personal core value might be an interesting way to think about what everybody defines as their kind of set of core values because there might be some continuity there. There may be some differences that are interesting to talk about. You might ask people to define. I always love to start a core value session with why people joined the company, because hearing people's why is actually really motivating but interesting, right? Because it gives a little bit as to what they view the company to be, which is an interesting lens to put the core values on. You may have fun exercises at a team offsite I did years ago. We had a really fun exercise where we, once we had our set of core values, we actually tried to design a mascot, a company mascot based on the core values, which is like just fun. Like, there is anything gonna come out of that? Not really, but it was it was fun to get creative about how they could materialize. So building in like that healthy balance of fun with the exercises, because it is mentally draining. Um, these things can be mentally draining. So just balancing a little bit of fun with with the activities, and then again, ultimately kind of converging on different things, break off into groups, right? Change the format for the to for the day so people can think in different ways. And the way that I did it last, the the last time we did it, this most recent, we did one day of that kind of structured exercise thinking. We then you got to kind of sleep on it a little bit, right? We come back the next day, where the next day was kind of the converging day, and and we had sort of landed upon where we were going with the values, but we hadn't landed upon what that meant in practice. So that gave us space to kind of restructure things, rewrite things a little bit, and then and then bring it to the team as a whole. So we didn't make that mandatory. We didn't make it this time, we didn't make it mandatory for the entire company to participate. We made it optional, but we still had probably like 80% of the company participated in it. And then that team, we kind of created like culture captains or you can call it whatever you want, but they they presented the values to the company as a whole and then got one final round of buy-in if there were any ideas from the group as a whole. And then we put them and then put them everywhere, right? Then we put them in Slack, we put them in SharePoint, we put them on the wall, we put them on the TV, we put like they were everywhere for a while of how you think about them, and then embed them into practice, right? Then build them into your growth frameworks and your performance review cycle and your interview process. And at our weekly wins meeting, we give kudos, but the kudos have to be kind of in the vein of a core value, right? Like really embed them into the day-to-day practice, and then to the point earlier, lock in a refresh process.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Very nice. And I think I think what you're showing there is just how much you value it, because I always think a good indication of how much a CEO values doing something is how much time they dedicate to it. And the fact that you're willing to dedicate two days of your whole team's time on a voluntary basis to it indicates how important you think it is.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Yeah, that's pretty fair. Yeah, anything that we've dedicated like a full day or two days to is probably the the recurring themes of things that are most important to the founder. That's that's yeah, it's definitely true. And I suppose what why is that?

SPEAKER_00 31:14

What what do you see for people saying that what what is the benefit for the business of doing it? Do you do you see sort of doing it leads to faster growth, to better retention, more proper internet? What what are what are the markers that you think it it leads to?

SPEAKER_01 31:28

Yeah, 100% it's gonna be some of those things you talked about, right? So employee retention, absolutely. Yeah. If you are, if you are a mission-driven company, then having that mission be front and foremost, or first and foremost, front and center, and having a set of core values, it makes up that kind of operating contract for an employee, right? So that of course is gonna be strong for retention, but it's also an efficiency thing, 100%, right? If you a founder's job, we only have so many things we have to be doing, right? We have to make sure that the the right people are on the bus. The bus has gas, it has a map of where to go, right? Like that's our job. And so it's about fundraising and capital management, it's about hiring and retention, and it's about setting the plan and making sure people know that that's the plan and reiterating that as many times as you can possibly do. And the rest is up to the team to row in the same direction. And so if you have a really strong operating cadence and contract of how we work together, it all helps you move that much more efficient. So for us at TRACT, we have mission vision, of course. Vision is gonna be your 20, 50 year horizon, that far, far foreseeable future. You're gonna have the mission, which is our kind of 10-year horizon. We have OKRs, which are our annual and quarterly kind of cadence, but then we have the core values, which are how we get there, right? And so it's not the what we're doing, it's the or why we're doing it. So you have your why, you have your what, and then it's the how we do it. So what it allows people to do is sit in the boat and row in the same direction because they can always give feedback to each other that you're operating outside of the core values, right? You're slowing us down right now because you're not operating in accordance with the core values. So let's let's fix that, right? Let's let's fix that. Or that process doesn't work. Yeah, of course it doesn't work. It's counter to what we all kind of agreed to do together. So for for me, it's always going to be those balance of does it help us get to where we're going faster and more effective? Does it help the team grow, be stronger, be top performing, have high retention? Or does it help our customers in some way, shape, or form? And in this case, core values helps with with all of those.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

I always think it's a culture. I think values, what scrap means values are what people do when you're not what when you're not looking. Yeah. And I think as a as a leader, if you can, if you hire according to values, you can be relatively sure that your team will do not do what you would do, but they might do how you, like with the same thinking or intention you might do it. Which I think allows you to build your business in a very different way. Like it's less about command and control, it's more about empowerment. So I think if you get the values piece wrong, you are then setting yourself up for having to manage and lead in a whole different way.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Yeah, which every founder listening is gonna have to go through if you're gonna fundraise, right? So the second you start putting your fundraising hat on, you're locked in for what, okay, short-term, three months if you're an AI company with a gazillion dollars in revenue. But but but maybe it's a few days. But for most of us out there, it's probably six months, right? Like it's a six-month journey from prepping a data room to outreach to close, would it you know, call it three to six months, then in an optimist world, if not longer, for a lot of folks, depending on the industry you're in and again the traction you have. So you are stepping away from the business for that period of time, whether you admit it or you're not, right? It doesn't really matter how much time you're putting into the business. You're you're you are stepping away from the business if you have an effective fundraise. And things are gonna drop, right? Balls are going to drop. And and your best investment you can make in your team is to ensure that that doesn't happen as much as possible. But you have to acknowledge it's going to happen. And so you're trying to reduce that risk as much as possible. And it's gonna happen several times, right? It's not like you fundraise, most people don't fundraise once and get the happy ending that they're they're looking for, right? So you're probably gonna fundraise a few times. You may step out. I just was on maternity leave, right? I just stepped out for maternity leave. Now I was still online because that's what we do as founders, which is a whole other topic. But but I was but I was out, right? And so balls are gonna drop, and you may travel for a conference for even if it's for a few days, balls are gonna drop, right? So if the business fundamentally that much relies on a founder that they can't do those activities, it is going to suffer. You need the founder to be able to fundraise, you need the CEO to be able to fundraise, you need the founder and CEO to be able to go to conferences, to do trade shows, to go to Cut clients. You need the founder to be able to go do those things because they also help the business. So that means the day-to-day has to be able to operate and that changes from stage to stage, right? And the seed stage is just not going to be true. The founder has to be involved in all these things to your point earlier. But at some point it's gonna have to start changing and that starts to professionalize itself and scale. And so, or or unhealthy behaviors start forming everywhere, right? So, in a healthy scenario, you have to be able to do that, which means your team has to scale and core values to your point. That's one of the easiest ways to to know that the team is gonna kind of go at least in the direction that you would go, even if you're not in the room saying go in that direction. And that's a great thing.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

Well, that feels like a really nice, nice way to lead on to ask the final question, which is for founders listening, what is one thing that you would suggest they do around this today?

SPEAKER_01 37:09

Yeah, my my usual answer is is start that exercise, right? If you don't have core values, start do a kickoff, right? Do some form to to get this going. But for those maybe who have core values, because I do think a lot of companies actually set core values, but maybe if you're listening and you have core values and they're not being implemented as maybe aggressively as I've kind of as I've advocated for, maybe something that you could do is look through look through your values and see if you've actually outlined how they can be used in a day-to-day. So not just the what it is and again the kind of description of it, but identify with each value one to three ways in your current day-to-day that you could that the core value materializes, right? And if you take that together, then you've got a playbook, right? You've got 10, however many values you have, let's say two to five or something, but you've got 10, 15, 20 actions that you do as a team on a day-to-day basis that also reflect the core value. And that allows you to then start those proactive processes to interview based on core values or give performance reviews based off core values because you have the actual actions and the value itself, right? And and so if you're not yet utilizing your core values in the way you want to be utilizing them, that's maybe one small thing that you could pretty quickly go out and do that could open up a little bit of a ripple effect into some other ways that they can materialize.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

I think that's really nice. Like with my last business, I think I'll think maybe I'll add to that is that actually it might not be as you need to commit to this and do it, stick with it. I think when you start talking about values, people can be a little bit sort of resistant at first or think this this is a thing that'll pass, and they can start and ignore it. But like your kudos idea, maybe the first three months people are a bit shy. But once you get six months and you're still doing it in nine months, people do eventually start buying in and it becomes super powerful. So maybe if if they do all this and they think after three months, oh I haven't really seen male dad is just stick with it. Because it really does have impact.

SPEAKER_01 39:31

Yeah, I think my favorite moment is always when somebody who gives kudos without the core value. For a while, maybe they're new, let's say, right? So they're not used to it or they're reluctant for like you said, but then suddenly, like a few months in, they will call out somebody else and say, Hey, that doesn't have a core value. I love that moment. It's it's a good moment because it means they've like, they've gotten it. They clicked for them of why we do it, right? And so it was it's the same for me as OKRs, which I can also always nerd out about, but because I'm a big OKR fan. But that second that somebody says, Hey, well, why are we doing that? What OKR does it drive? It's like the same feeling internally for me, which again, that doesn't say much, I think, for how we as founders are are are, but it's really an exciting moment when people, when it finally kind of snowballs and starts taking off and becomes a culture of itself a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 40:25

Amazing. Well, Asin, thank you so much for that. There was so much practical takeaways, so many practical takeaways people in there. And I love how you're coming at this values thing and how you reinforce it. And you're very clear why why you're doing it. So I hope people listening are off are taking their team out tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

Me too, yeah. Good luck to everybody trying to do it. It's it's always fun to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time today. Thanks, James. Such a good episode to David Allison. I love the really practical ways you suggested to bring your values to life and reinforce what you're already doing. We'll see you next Wednesday for another founder episode, or Monday for the Peer Effect post bag with Freddie. As ever, if any questions, just email us at hello at peer-effect.com or reach out on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening and happy scaling.