„There’s no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated.” Richard Branson

Gunnar Holmsteinn, COO of QuizUp, gave us some inspiring insights about the topic “Culture” in the latest lecture of “How to start a Startup”. Before I share some impressions of the lecture a couple of words about Gunnar:

The Icelandic born entrepreneur was founder and CEO of CLARA previously, which is the first Icelandic startup that existed successfully. After this exciting event, Gunnar spent a couple of months in the Silicon Valley and worked for the acquiring company, Jive Software. In 2014 when he started working for QuizUp, the startup had about 40 employees and was struggling a bit with the growth of the company. He gave us some incredible insights how he handled this situation and how valuable a company culture can be. 

As an introduction, Gunnar showed us three different perspectives to take into account when outlining a company, specifically here QuizUp:

#the feature – they are going to be the Trivial Pursuit of the 21^st century -> their north star

#numbers – making the company transparent and interesting for investors as well as employees

#soft-touch/emotional part – the network effect they are creating with their vision

When he started working as the COO, he interviewed all employees and asked them about what is going well (highlight), not so well (lowlight) and topics that are not talked about (nolight) in the company. He analysed the current situation and started leveraging the “lights”. For instance, the QuizUp Camp was initialized, a two day event once a year outside of Reykjavik where all employees are participating. Basically, it is a huge brainstorm and socializing session to reflect the past and the future of the young company. In this way, the nolights and typical lowlights of the startup are considered and discussed. Especially the fast growth of startups make it more difficult for them to keep their traditions. That is why Gunnar puts emphasis on the personal fit already in the job interview. He talks about the values of the company, asks how the applicants interpret them and makes sure that not only their skills match to the job requirements, but also their character.

One story that inspired me very much concerned the following value:

“Wait for Nothing! Risk something!”

QuizUp has just started a cooperation with an American television show. They are going to make a Quiz, which users will use during the show on a Sunday evening. That means a lot of traffic and requires a robust IT-System, because they are going to have millions of active users at the same time. A situation they never had before – something venture! They decided to grab this opportunity of cooperation because they believe in their vision. In order to achieve goals you have to risk something – sometimes the entire company. 

“Hopefully it’ll work!”

Another value that Gunnar talked about a lot and which is the basis for highly performing teams is trust. One measure they introduced are the so-called “Friday-feeling-meetings”. During the afternoon in the chill area, the team members are talking about things that made them happy, sad or angry and share stories from their personal life or the job. Sharing these basic emotions and opening up like that creates a team spirit and trust. Moreover, employees are welcome to bring their family along for breakfast, lunch or even dinner. Very unique, I would say! 

However, many of these attitudes are strongly connected to longer working hours. Nevertheless, people who decide to apply for a job in a startup know that they are rather working to change something in the world than working just for the money.

Gunnar shared an incredible view on teamwork with us, a philosophy that he is creating at QuizUp which is unique and a way of modern leadership which improved the company day by day.

Thanks for the inspiring lecture and if I could have pushed the “feeling button” after the lecture, I would have gone for a happy smile :-)

“Competition is for losers” Peter Thiel

If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly, writes Peter Thiel.

Based on the lecture from Peter which he taught in Stanford a year ago we talked about the value your company creates and how to capture this value in the first part of our course “How to Start a Startup”. That simply means, are you in a perfect competition or are you a monopoly? On which site do you see your company? What do you focus on? Do you compare your business with competitors and try to find better solutions than they do? Or do you keep focusing on the niche market you identified because you know your product is going to create a demand? 

I totally agree with the fact that competition is good for our markets, because it forces businesses to get better in what they are doing to stay ahead of competition. Even in my personal life I’m competing because I compare myself with people around me and strive to beat the ones who are doing better than me. That makes you grow!

When we talked about monopoly, we do not mean the resource-based industries which control prices by regulating the amount of vital resources. We are interested in creative companies that give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance of the world, was one of Bala’s points. Let us take Google as an example. How do they see their business? Would you say that this is a monopoly?

Probably most of the people would say “sort of, yes…” and that is obvious, because they own 89,6 %  of the internet search engines market in July 2015, followed by Yahoo with 3,4 %. 

What if Google is not just a search engine? Suppose we say it is an advertising company – that would change things immediately!  The size of this global market is not just a few billion, it is half a trillion – around 8 times Warren Buffets’ net worth.

In addition, no one would say that Google is doing something illegal or it reached this position because the governments pushed it. In 1998 when Google was founded, it was going for a small market, but by now it has taken the whole market over year-by-year and has found ways to expand country-by-country. Again, it never focused on competitors and when Google started there were already 20 search engines, but Google focused on developing its concept of search in the www.

In the second part of the lecture, we visited the QuizUp HQ in Reykjavik and attended a talk about the android technique behind the game and social network apps which they are creating. It was interesting to explore a startup office and to see how colourful and homely everything was furnished. The talks were very theoretical and focused on the programming part, not really my topic, but socialising and networking during the event was very interesting.