By Ron Miller. Originally published in TechCrunch.

If a startup founder could peer 8 years into the future and see a company that has become the symbol for disruptive culture, one that has raised over $8 billion on a valuation of $67 billion, that has a worldwide presence in hundreds of cities, millions of app downloads,12,000 full time employees and thousands more working for your service, chances are they would start it.

Every startup founder craves success, but the question is, how far are you willing to go to achieve that success. Uber is the company that generated those heady results, but it did so at a cost. After months of one scandal after another at Uber, CEO Travis Kalanick stepped down last week.

The takeaway for startup founders should be that culture matters as much, if not more, as a good idea and some funding — and you need to start thinking about this from your earliest days.

Who are you? Who? Who?

Under the leadership of Kalanick, Uber appears to have chosen ‘The Lord of The Flies’ as its cultural roadmap, and it’s a cautionary tale that startup founders everywhere need to contemplate as they build their companies. What kind of value system do you hope to cultivate? Do you want to have a no-holds barred approach that leads to bullying, harassment and grossly inappropriate behaviors, or do you want to build a legitimate meritocracy where the best ideas and the most talented people are rewarded?

It doesn’t seem like this should even be a question, but it’s something the core first group of employees need to define early on, encouraging positive internal values. It’s not something that develops by accident.

As we’ve seen, an aggressive cultural strategy can lead to a toxic work environment in which the more powerful people in the organizations (the managers and executive team) hold an inordinate amount of power over employees and that leads to the kind of gross abuses we heard about at Uber.

Let this be a lesson, kids

It would be a mistake to think that Uber stands alone as some sort of isolated case. It’s not. Last year, fast-growing human resources firm, Zenefits, which had raised over $583 million — including a whopping $500 million on a $4.5 billion valuation in 2015 — ran into serious trouble when the company was accused of selling health insurance in several states without a license and building pernicious culture.

In a matter of a few days, CEO and company founder Parker Conrad and head of sales Sam Blond resigned under a cloud of scandal. To be fair, the company has tried to move on from this, but it was yet another example for startups everywhere that culture matters.

Need further proof? There are many cases including Whitney Wolf’s sexual harassment lawsuit at Tinder that resulted in the suspension of co-founder Justin Mateen and eventually co-founder and CEO Sean Rad leaving his post (although he stayed on as a board member and president).

Each of these cases, and unfortunately, many more like them, show that if you cut corners and fail to cultivate a positive culture, it eventually catches up with you, no matter how successful you may be in the short term.

They’ve got to be carefully taught

Freada Kapor Klein of Kapor Capital, who along with her husband Mitch Kapor, was an early investor in Uber, has publicly criticized the company’s culture. She says, the time to think about building a positive culture is at the earliest stages of forming the company.

“It’s almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of intentionally building a positive culture from the start. Finding time to articulate values, principles and how you want to be known is critical. There’s always too much to do, but retrofitting culture or diversity and inclusion in a big company is much harder,” Kapor Klein told TechCrunch.

“It’s almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of intentionally building a positive culture from the start.” — Freada Kapor Klein

Steve Herrod, who was an early employee at VMware and today is the managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst, says this is a topic that is top of mind and something the partners at GC always talk about when evaluating whether to fund a startup.

“A substantial part of our investment decision, especially at Series A, goes into assessing the values and style of the founders,” Herrod told TechCrunch. “We have passed several times when we sensed a founder was cutting corners, overly exaggerating achievements, bragging too much, or indicating any form of moral ambiguity,” he said.

General Catalyst goes even further to ensure a startup is building a positive culture by having one partner who is entirely focused on team assessment and development. “[This partner] joins the lead partner in ongoing assessments of our startups with a particular eye to cultures trending negatively. We [also] have a stable of coaches and other development resources that we can bring to bear when needed,” Herrod said.

Thinking ahead

Kapor Klein says culture needs to be front and center as part of the business plan. “Companies set business goals all the

time. They use these goals to check their progress and hold themselves accountable to the metrics. If a company is not taking the same approach to culture then they’re showing you that they aren’t taking it as seriously as they take other business goals,” Kapor Klein explained.

“If these aren’t genuine concerns of the founders, there will always be a disconnect between what’s stated and what’s practiced. That gulf between words and actions is the quickest way to create distrust and cynicism,” she added.

Danny Crichton, a NYC investor in early stage companies, agrees it’s something that needs to be foundational for the company. “It’s mostly just thinking about it from the earliest possible moments. And to start with the right cultural thinking. Ultimately culture is an extension of the founder. Uber’s culture [was] Travis Kalanick,” Crichton said.

Crichton says if you don’t think about it early on, it gets harder to change as you grow. “It’s very difficult to undo a negative culture. And the problem is that once culture gets baked in, it’s basically done. I think nothing will really repair it, but we’ll see,” he said.

Kapor Klein sees it not being so much about the organization as the people in charge, and the more ingrained the negative culture, the harder it’s going to be to change. “Cultures don’t spin out of control—people do. If the core culture is sound, it can be reinstilled. If the core culture caused the problems, it’s a longer, messier process of rebuilding. Sometimes we just need guardrails, sometimes we need a complete overhaul,” she said.

Taking a positive approach to culture

There are examples of highly successful companies achieving growth and building a positive internal culture. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

A prime example is Salesforce, a company currently on a $10 billion run rate, which very early on decided to be as intentional about the company culture as they were about their products and how they would go to market.

“We believe that culture cannot be left to chance; it must be deliberate, measured and consistent from day one,” Cindy Robbins, Executive Vice President of Global Employee Success at Salesforce told TechCrunch.

For Salesforce, it’s about putting together culture, technology and data as a formula for employee engagement, she said, and they take it even further with an integrated philanthropy model called 1-1-1. While you could dismiss all of this as PR fluff, the company has devoted thousands of hours to community service and donated or discounted software to non-profits , and according to the company website, has given more than $160 million in community grants over the years.

Further, it has attempted to eliminate the gender pay gap at Salesforce and last year hired Tony Prophet as the company’s first chief equality officer to bring equality issues to the forefront of the company. The company has also exported the 1-1-1 model through the Pledge 1% program and 2000 companies are following a similar program including Appirio, Box, DocuSign, Glassdoor, Optimizely, Twilio, Xactly, Yelp and Zuora.

Startups behaving well

As much as the negative examples of culture get the vast amount of attention, there are plenty of people working hard to build a positive culture and a solid business.

While Salesforce is a long established company, Clef, an identity startup launched in 2013, that became part of Twilio in March, put culture at the center of its hiring process, and went so far as to create a handbook, which it then “open sourced” for others to use. Founder B Byrne put it this way when he wrote a blog post in 2015 announcing the company was open sourcing the handbook:

“Building a company is hard. Building a company that prioritizes inclusion in an industry that doesn’t is even harder. Both this handbook and our company are a long way from perfect, but this is a start. One of our values is to be better today than yesterday, and we’re excited to have help making this core part of our company better,” he wrote.

Another company trying to do it differently is Trivago, the German hotel search site, which claims to be building the company to be a meritocracy where no single person has total power over another person’s career.

“Removing workplace politics/stereotyping bias from decision making should be the focus. Individuals should not have to worry about these coming into play when it comes to their personal growth and development within the company,” Trivago CFO Axel Hefer told TechCrunch.

While Rolf Schrömgens, CEO and founder at Trivago admits that it really wasn’t something they thought about right away, as the company grew, the earliest employees began to recognize they needed a system in place to ensure a positive cultural approach, especially with a diverse staff from all over world.

“It was less an active decision that we made in the beginning, and more of a necessity that we realized over time. If you want to keep your company constantly learning, if you want your organization to stay liquid and have decisions [made] fast, if you believe in the superiority of intrinsic motivation, then you have to realize a culture of trust, respect and authenticity is the only way to go,” Schrömgens explained.

Nobody’s perfect

Trivago reports a male/female employee split of 58.2% to. 41.7% with over 50 nationalities working at the company’s Düsseldorf, Germany headquarters.

It’s worth noting that Glass Ceiling reviews of the company don’t paint quite as rosy a picture of the company’s culture as the company’s executives, especially when it comes to advancement opportunities and salary.

Still, Trivago has nearly doubled its stock price since it went public last December growing from an IPO price of $11.85 to $20.86 this week. Salesforce, which has been around since 1999 and went public in 2004, has a market cap of almost $63 billion and it’s stock price has grown steadily over the last five years from $34.28 in June 2012 to $86.82 this week, proving at least for these companies that a positive culture and positive business results can go hand in hand.

It shouldn’t be about the money though, it should be about doing the right thing by your employees, and the financial success should follow.

In fact, there is no perfect approach to culture, but we know that setting goals around compassion, diversity, charity, a willingness to share ideas, while providing mechanisms for all employees to grow and be appreciated — all of these things make for a more positive culture.

That clearly seems to be a better approach than a noxious culture. As we’ve seen repeatedly, that cultural approach eventually catches up with a company. Surely, Uber’s case (and others) should be a lesson for every startup that it’s better to start that process of building a positive culture from day one — and not have to go back and fix it or retrofit it down the road.

FEATURED IMAGE: RAWPIXEL/SHUTTERSTOCK (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Originally published on the Pledge 1% Colorado blog.

On May 16, as part of Boulder Startup Week, Pledge 1% Colorado – an initiative of the Community Foundation Boulder County – and other sponsors launched a contest to showcase how cross-sector collaborations are positively impacting our community. El Centro Amistad, one of the six finalists, shared with us their approach to the contest, and what they learned:

Who we are & why we entered the contest

What we did

What happened and how we feel

How this process was for us

Where we go from here

By Erin Reilly, Twilio.  See original post on Entrepreneur.

These days, it seems like every startup is trying to figure out how to launch a social impact or “.org” arm. They see it helps build the brand, boost loyalty and even drive revenue. But, many aren’t sure how to start.

In my time working in social impact at Yahoo, Google and now at Twilio, I’ve learned that social impact can’t be “a nice to have” or something you add on so that your company is able to say, “We give back.” Social impact works best when it is an integral part of your company’s strategy, culture and values. How do you make that happen? Here are my tips for anyone who is getting started: 

1. Figure out the unique assets your company can offer.

Too often, a company’s attempt at doing good in the world is inspired by the favorite cause of a philanthropy-minded executive. Instead, consider the assets and offerings of your company, and find an angle into helping the world that your company can uniquely provide. While I was at Yahoo, I was working on the company’s green initiative. At the time, Yahoo’s home page was viewed by hundreds of millions of people every month, so it became our greatest asset for sharing tips on how consumers can be more eco-friendly in their own lives.

Ask yourself, does your product make it easier to mobilize volunteers? Do your employees have a specific skill that’s hard to come by? You’ll drive more impact by drafting off the momentum of your company’s core offering, and you’ll generate a halo that makes sense for your brand.

2. Make social responsibility as critical to the success of your company as any other strategic initiative.

Build ties so that when your company grows and generates more revenue, you also increase your ability to generate social impact. With an estimated 10 million nonprofits worldwide, providing your products at discounted rates to nonprofits, like Tableau, Splunk, Slack and many others do, allows you to make your products more accessible to many organizations while generating sustainable program revenue. Creating a virtuous cycle between social impact and business success and actively making them inextricably tied is important for the sustainability of both efforts.

3. Put a team in place.

If you’re serious about social impact, then it can’t be the side project of an employee who has another role at the company. When you value your social impact program as much as any other revenue-generating program, it is critical that you staff it that way. Hire a team who is responsible for creating, executing and reporting on your plan. That way, it won’t be ancillary, it will be integral to the success of the business.

For example, if it’s a product-driven company, then the social impact team should report into product or supply chain to ensure they align with the goals of product development. Or if the company’s brand is one of its biggest assets, then reporting into marketing will help social impact be imbedded into the overall positioning.  Better yet, have the team leader report into the CEO as part of the executive team to ensure social impact aligns with the overall company strategy and direction.

4. Join Pledge 1%.

Pledge 1% is an organization that encourages companies to dedicate 1 percent of their employees’ time, their product or their profits to social impact. More than the authenticity of putting your money and time where your mouth is, formalizing your commitment to social impact will inspire your company to real action for the long haul. Taking the pledge also immediately brings you into a community of over 1,500 peer companies, including Atlassian, Box and Okta, who are committed to giving back in the same ways you are.

5. Celebrate loudly.

So often we work, work, work, and even when we have a win, we move too quickly to the next thing. Take time to celebrate because it helps everyone in the company feel proud of the good work they’re doing in the world. For example, at the Salesforce annual Dreamforce conference, there’s an entire summit track dedicated to customers who are doing good. It’s powerful watching the employees as well as the community be inspired by the work of these organizations. One of the genuinely wonderful realities of corporate social impact is the impact on morale.

6. Measure and report. 

Set goals for social impact in the same way you would any area of the company — this holds you accountable and keeps you focused on progress. Be sure to articulate metrics for business impact as well as social impact in your objectives. Measure monthly and quarterly, report out to other departments to share your impact and successes. Many companies, including Google, LinkedIn and Twitter, use an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system to track progress. The social impact team’s OKRs should roll up and support the overall company objectives, just like every other team at your company.

By Greg Baldwin, President of VolunteerMatch. Originally shared on LinkedIn.

For more than a decade, leading companies have been investing in making their community engagement programs more strategic. This is why so few have succeeded — until now. 

In 2002, a ground-breaking article, The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy, appeared in the Harvard Business Review. In it, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer challenged the prevailing argument at the time that philanthropy and business were inherently contradictory. Instead, they made the point, which has shaped a generation of business leaders, that companies can, and should, “…systematically apply their distinctive strengths to maximize the social and economic value created by their philanthropy.”

For over a decade now, smart companies have been innovating and evolving to align their giving practices with their business goals.

At VolunteerMatch, we’ve both benefited from and contributed to this evolution and are excited by how many companies are embracing strategic philanthropy. Companies are no longer asking whether they should align their strengths with the needs of the community, but how to do it effectively, affordably and at scale.

But as anyone who’s worked in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) space knows, this is generally easier said than done — particularly when it comes to corporate volunteering.

The problem is that successful corporate volunteer experiences must effectively align with the interests of the business, the employees, and the community — and that’s hard to do.

Too often, one or more of these interests are ignored, invariably resulting in the most common problems with corporate community engagement: low-impact, low-engagement, and low-quality volunteer experiences.

Unfortunately, these problems are the norm. Most companies struggle to find practical solutions that effectively close what we at VolunteerMatch have come to call the Engagement Gap.

The Engagement Gap

What is the Engagement Gap? And why is it such an issue?

Let me explain it this way. There are three key stakeholders in every corporate-volunteer experience, and they all bring their own unique expectations to the table:

• Companies want volunteer opportunities that match their strategy, brand, and culture.


• Employees want volunteer opportunities that match their interests, skills, and schedules.


• Nonprofits want volunteers that match their programs, priorities, and values.

While it is tempting to simplify the problem by focusing on the interests of just one or two of these stakeholders rather than all three, the consequences of that approach are predictable and problematic. Shortchanging company interests results in programs that lack leadership and resources. Shortchanging employee interests results in programs that lack traction and engagement. And shortchanging community interests results in programs that lack purpose and impact.

In their Snapshot 2015 report, titled The New Corporate DNA: Where Employee Engagement and Social Impact Converge, America’s Charities writes, “Alignment of corporate goals, employee interests, and nonprofit needs is essential. Companies can drive greater engagement but they need to align strategically to match corporate and employee interests with the genuine needs of nonprofit organizations.”

There is, of course, no one-size-fits all solution to this challenge, but the failure to build systems that effectively align these interests at scale is why so many corporate volunteer programs are either off-strategy, low-impact, or even worse — unhelpful.

Using New Technologies to Solve the Problem at Scale

After working in this field for more than a decade, we believe this isn’t a peopleproblem — it’s a system problem. It’s not that the people involved lack of training, compassion, or awareness, it is that the systems and strategies they are using to match their distinctive strengths, skills, and interests with local volunteer opportunities do not work well at scale.

VolunteerMatch has for over a decade been passionate about reducing the fragmentation and friction that undermine effective engagement, but technical limitations and old assumptions prevented us from serving thousands of companies. The fact is until last year, the VolunteerMatch Network — the web’s largest volunteer engagement service — was, for the most part, only accessible through products built by our small, but mighty, nonprofit team. We had organized the volunteer needs of more that 110,000 community based organizations but the network was closed and only available through our own products and services. By restricting access to the network in this way, we realized we were preventing tens of thousands of local community organizations and millions of employees from the possibility of connecting to make a real and meaningful difference together.

We are committed to changing that.

The work began last year with a pivotal strategic announcement that, for the first time ever, we would open our network to other like-minded third-party corporate giving platforms to make it easier for more employees, in more companies, to put their volunteer time and talent to good use.

The Courage to Change

Over the last year we’ve become allies with former adversaries, and because of that, five of the most popular corporate giving platforms now offer the VolunteerMatch Network to their corporate customers. This makes it easier for companies to align their business interests and the talents of their employees with the needs of the local community at scale. By having access to over 100,000 volunteer opportunities on any given day that span every ZIP code across the U.S., employees and employee volunteer program managers can find opportunities that match their interest and skills with a simple search. Also, because each volunteer opportunity is current and posted by a verified tax-exempt organization, companies and employees won’t waste their time trying to volunteer at an organization that doesn’t really need their help, or is a bad fit.

Long-term companies will save millions of dollars a year by avoiding the extraordinarily expensive alternative of having to organize, manage, and maintain private networks of available volunteer opportunities for their employees. They will also save nonprofits the aggravation and cost of having to duplicate and maintain their volunteer opportunities on dozens of private “gated networks.”

I’ll confess that change, as they say, is never easy. I spent many long nights worrying about all the things that could go wrong with a strategic shift of this magnitude. But we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to make a difference and are grateful to the many allies and advisors who gave us the courage to commit to reinventing ourselves. We’re both proud and excited to see so many amazing organizations like Box, Cisco, Marketo, MGM, New Relic, Pandora, Pfizer, Robert Half, Target, VMWare and dozens more take advantage of these new solutions.

A New Vision for Corporate Community Engagement in the Digital Age

If the current political climate has taught us anything it is that our communities are fragile, underserved, and divided. Corporate community engagement programs can not overcome the challenges we face on their own, but they can make a much bigger difference than they have ever made before as new expectations and possibilities converge. Companies are getting smarter about the role purpose plays in their culture, employees are demanding more meaningful opportunities to put their interests and skills to good use, and nonprofits are adopting new technologies that scale their capacity to more effectively collaborate with volunteers.

At its best, corporate volunteering is not about t-shirts, time-off, or talking points. It’s about the opportunity every company has to strengthen their own business and culture by making a meaningful and positive contribution to their community and our society.

Milton Friedman was wrong when he wrote, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…” He was wrong not because his logic was flawed, but because the singular pursuit of profits has now become increasingly unprofitable.

Think about it. As customers, employees, investors, managers, and communities, we expect more. We know a healthy economy is fundamental to healthy communities, but over the last 20 years expectations have shifted and fewer people are drawn to businesses that wear the profit motive as their singular reason to be.

I know there are still companies that don’t care much about their employees or their community, but it’s an increasingly risky and unfashionable strategy. Smart businesses have always put purpose first and with time we can see why that is so important culturally, economically, and strategically.

The opportunity we see in the decade ahead is not about persuading companies of their obligation to give back. It’s about building technology, systems, policies, and partnerships that more effectively align the interests of companies, employees, and communities at scale in the digital age.

Start closing the engagement gap now. Learn more about how the VolunteerMatch Network can integrate with your volunteer program.

Step 1: Identify a Potential Pledge

Founders and companies—big and small—are welcome to join our community!  Here are some ideas for people you can ask:

• Your co-founder


• Other members of your accelerator or co-working space


• Classmates


• Advisors


• Independent contractors


• Fellow entrepreneurs


• Clients


• Neighbors/Family members


• Friends

Step 2: Ask Them to Take the Pledge

Email, call, text, tweet, tag, grab a coffee – do whatever you have to do to ask your peers to join you in pledging 1%.

They can sign up at pledge1percent.org.  It will only take a minute of their time, and our Pledge Success Manager will be in touch to help your new pledge get started!

Step 3: Let Us Know!

Email us or tweet using #PledgeItForward so we can thank you for recruiting a new pledge!  We are offering a variety of exciting perks to people who #PledgeItForward.  Don’t miss out on some great promotional opportunities and sweet swag!