Five things I learned in six years at SoundCloud

A few weeks ago, I started posting on Twitter. It was a shaft of ideas, insights and lessons that I received during my six years at SoundCloud, helping a startup to become the largest sound and music platform on the web.

I quit college, sang in a hardcore group, worked in tourists, marketing, and founded bad businesses. Joining SoundCloud was one of the highlights of my life. I learned a lot.

After 20 tweets and 2 hours I wanted to describe all these thoughts in detail. It is hard to describe ideas, carry them to paper and hope that others will like them. Today I will try to do it.
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5 things I want to talk about in more detail.

1. Corporate culture = a group of people living with similar values

Culture is the sum of people who carry the key values ​​of a company every day, multiplied by how these values ​​are transmitted inside and outside the company.

The definition of values ​​began as an interesting task, and turned into a unique opportunity. First, we met with internal resistance - people did not want us to choose a set of meaningless phrases and became “too corporate”. It was important for us to show the whole team the meaning of these values ​​and turn the process into a common cause. Having defined our values, we learned a valuable lesson: the importance of communication within the team and the inclusion of values ​​in the work. They must form a working platform, guide the decision-making process, and they must also become tools for motivating work within our culture. You really start to love company values ​​when you see what effect they have on a company culture.

When I ask people what they like about our company, then usually everyone answers - “people”. For many of us, working in SoundCloud means working with the smartest, passionate, and cute people.

The second most popular answer - the results of the company. Development, creation and support of excellent products for musicians, sound artists and listeners. We define the future of music industry, the product and the community of creators and listeners.

The third most popular answer is our values. Openness, opportunity for personal growth, opportunities for learning and teaching, interesting challenges and independence with autonomy.

At the beginning of their work, the founders Alex and Eric believed that they created an excellent product. Then they realized that they were creating an excellent company, creating an excellent product. Finally, they realized that the most important thing was to create a culture that allows them to create an excellent company that creates an excellent product.

Culture is stronger nishtyakov. Culture is the daily manifestation of your values. What culture suits you and how to create it?

2. In case of misunderstandings - communicate as much as possible.

When work goes fast, but also in several time zones, the main thing is clarity and repetition. Clarity creates context for information, for setting goals, and for matching the overall picture — for example, your company's vision and mission.

At the beginning of 2014, we decided to try to express as accurately as possible the main areas of activity of our company. We have reduced our goals to three priorities and tried to convey this to all members of the company. When people began to approach me with questions like: “Why do we repeat this, we already heard it,” I realized that the system was working.

Direct communication in our company is associated with one of our core values ​​- openness. We believe that this allows us to achieve the best results, that information should be an undercurrent that increases speed. This is especially important for a company operating in 4 offices in four different time zones.

Communication also helps create context so that people in a company can make decisions that help them build SoundCloud as a product and as a company.

Communication also helps to learn from mistakes and successes - many teams keep journals, documenting acquired knowledge and describing why something went wrong or not.

3. The department for working with people - more than just HR

And all the lessons described are the biggest for me. My experience has always told me that the HR department should be treated as an auxiliary, which deals with salaries and complaints. I was wrong. Observing how our HR department grew from zero to a multi-functional international team from business partners, employing partners, services, office management and internal communications, I was amazed. It was one of the most vivid and instructive impressions in six years.

We consider a company a community, and we have built our HR department as a team that helps take care of the community and grow it. Putting people first and considering them as business partners, first of all following philosophical principles, and only then - business processes, and making the organization's health a priority issue, it seems to me that we have built a team that can work best and positively influence on all of our employees, from the moment of communication with the candidates and ending with the moment when they leave us for their further achievements.

4. Hire (and grow) builders, not managers

One of the positive qualities of my colleagues is initiative, the desire to take a step forward, take responsibility and follow everything up to the end.

In a startup, when some things have not yet been developed, the processes are not in place, this means that the person did not have time to find a suitable solution. Creating an environment for teamwork, where people take responsibility and share it with others - this is what makes work in a startup more attractive than working for a large corporation.

At some point, people begin to "manage" units. And before that, you need builders and workers - those who quickly identify problems and work to solve them.

The best summaries are not those that focus on past accomplishments, but those that describe the requirements for the role that people want to play in the future. This makes you a builder, not a manager, who simply demonstrates a long list of irrelevant achievements.

5. Building a company is more than a startup

Sketching the product over the weekend, joining a startup in your youth are emotional roller coasters of start-up culture. All this is wonderful and must try. But the real feeling is to watch the company grow up and turn from a startup into a self-supporting structure where people come and do what they can in the best possible way.

Startups are awesome. Startups are devastating. But among the brilliance of startups and their twenty-year-old founders, there is a moment in life when you start to enjoy building a self-supporting company. The company responsible for its employees, customers, owners and partners.

It's good that nowadays you can practically connect from the bedroom to open technologies and create mobile applications. It's more interesting for me to create a healthy corporate culture within a self-sufficient company.