How to define, develop and maintain culture in fast-growing companies

“What’s your team culture like?” — A question I’m sure many of you are familiar with from hiring interviews, no matter if you’re a startup founder or a VC partner. All textbooks say it, a solid company culture is essential to the success of any business as it has a profound impact on its employees and reputation, and directly affects organizational growth and many other business aspects. But how do you really define, develop, and maintain culture in young and fast-growing companies?

We discussed this important topic with some of…

You’re probably reading this while working from your living room or kitchen, or maybe you’ve chosen a sunny get-away location. Accelerated by the pandemic, remote work has become the new normal — at least for knowledge workers. ven as the vaccine gets distributed, a high amount of workers won‘t jump at the opportunity and start commuting again. According to recent Gartner research, a large majority of executives say they intend to let employees work remotely either fully or at least part of the time. 36 percent of companies say they’re willing to hire workers who are 100 percent remote and…

If you’re the founder of a product-centric company, the product is your baby. In the beginning, it demands most of your brainpower, but once you start to scale the business, you need to leverage your time and pass this responsibility on to someone else. A key step, but probably one of the most difficult.

As there are many product-centric companies in the Creandum funds’ portfolio, we’ve dedicated our latest Founders’ Discussion (a monthly roundtable) to this topic to share learnings and best practices. To add some more experience to this challenge at scale, our new Entrepreneur-In-Residence, Leo Nilsson, former CPO…

Let’s face it, distributed teams…or remote…or virtual…whatever you want to call them, are here to stay. C19 kicked us all in the butt and there’s no turning back. Some companies were lucky and had already adapted to either a fully distributed setup or a hybrid one, but right now, across the board, companies are trying to wrap their heads around how to transition into this new world, where the team and work primarily have an online presence, and physical, face-to-face engagement is much rarer.

Naturally, the Creandum funds’ portfolio is going through the same thing, and recently we held a…

The strongest companies we see have founders who can challenge one another, but to do so requires different perspectives. In short, diversity drives better decision-making, which in turn builds better companies. There’s a great wave of female and under-represented founders emerging, but still, they constitute just a small proportion. The same goes for engineers and, unfortunately, also venture capital firms. Data from our annual diversity index indicate that there is progress across the gender dimension, but the trend is moving slowly. The reason is simply that this is a multifaceted, complex topic with no quick solutions, nor silver bullets.

As…

Two years ago Creandum started to actively measure gender diversity inside the funds’ portfolio, on the premise that what gets measured gets done. We have ever since then publicly reported our Creandum Gender Diversity Index (2018 + 2019). Here are the results for 2020, and although the balance is still male-dominated we do see some signs of progress.

A reminder of why diversity matters.

If anyone is still questioning why we care about this, it’s simply because of performance. We aspire to make the Creandum funds’ portfolio as successful as it possibly can be, and diversity plays a key role in that. …

The past era of consumer internet provided users with an endless ability to connect with others with social media at the core of this. These platforms create immense value for its users, but as 3.8B people seek social validation from each other we create a very externally focused life centered around comparison to others which can be very destructive. As much as this is the fault of technology, we firmly believe the same can offer a remedy. …

History tells the tale of many classic battles such as the battle of Waterloo between the British and French. In modern days, and with fewer human casualties there are some other well-remembered battles. Hipchat vs Slack, Tidal vs Spotify, and GoToMeeting vs Zoom are a few examples. We all know who won each one of them. So what’s the common denominator between the winner? The answer is quality!

This is obviously a somewhat a simplification of things, but in a competitive market over the longterm, quality is the only true differentiator for a business. …