Building culture | Daisy Linden & Kristen Kee

Transcript

[Music] thank you so it is early March 2020 and it's a few minutes before our weekly AMA is due to start at coinbase and normally this would put us in a big conference room bigger than this with our whole San Francisco team broadcasting all of the questions from our employees as well as all the company updates out to the world but today it's just me and Emily and Brian alone in a tiny conference room because a week ago we had sent everybody home optionally to work from home kind of a surprise and a week earlier our at the last AMA

that we'd had in person our chief people officer had cracked a joke that it was the last one we'd ever have in person and it was starting to look like he was right and I was sitting there scrolling through our employee questions many of which were about what it would mean for us as a company if kovid continued to spread and we did not have a lot of good answers other than sending people home to work but over the next three years we would learn a ton of lessons about how to be a remote company how to scale culture reinforce culture clarify culture and Hyper growth and that's what I'm going to talk about today so hello I'm Daisy Linden I lead employee experience at coinbase I have been with the company for five years seen it scale from 350 to 3 500 people seen us go public seeing us go remote

and whether more than one crypto winter so today I'm going to focus on a couple things related to culture so what culture is and why it matters I'm going to talk about lessons we've learned at coinbase from our journey around culture and remote first we're going to talk about where we haven't gotten it right where we've actually stumbled with respect to culture and and how that has helped us learn those lessons and then I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can get started with this work at the stage you're at today so to get started let's talk briefly about why culture matters so I want to acknowledge that um defining culture at a small company of 350 people is very different from doing that work at a company of three or even

30. and I suspect it feels pretty low on the list of things you all have to think about as Founders and founding teams but unless being a Founder is your very first job ever I suspect that you had an experience with culture at your prior company or companies and that that culture actually impacted how easy or hard it was to get your job done so I mean just thinking about it pragmatically like was there something that was super hard to do at your last company because the culture made it hard or something that was easy or made easier because the culture reinforced that way of working a very long way of saying culture matters and even though it can feel like soft stuff it has a direct impact on everything else about what it feels like

to work at your company so that's true everywhere in every industry but I would argue that it is especially true in crypto because no one knows better than the people in this room that this industry is still young and whether we're talking about policy updates or protocol changes or anything else there's a lot of uncertainty out in the world and not a lot of that is within your control as Founders or founding teams what is within your control is the experience that your employees have inside your company and you can create the confidence that the Market's not going to create for them by defining what the culture is how they should show up how they can be successful you can help them navigate the roller coaster of everything that crypto and blockchain is

in ways that you know is is harder to do for you than a an industry that is more established and that's true at coinbase Brian is very fond of reminding all of us all the time that it's Never As Good As It Seems and is never as bad as it seems and I think maybe the first example I experienced of this at coinbase was in summer 2019 Bitcoin broke ten thousand dollars for the first time in over a year and crypto Twitter was going nuts and obviously a lot of chatter inside the company and Brian popped on coinbase slack and was basically like grab a beer give your partner a high five celebrate for a couple minutes but then we're going back to work because we don't over rotate on crypto prices we don't over rotate on hype and that has helped us

build a company that is able to weather the ups and downs of crypto in a way that keeps people more confident and more calm in all of the moments where things could be hard so a culture that values that Long View was something that was really important to us and it's something that you can use as a lever also so before I go any further culture has like a thousand definitions so I actually want to talk about what I mean when I say culture so tldr culture is the how which includes things like language so what are the literal words that you're using to talk when you talk to your team um what are the terms what is sort of like the internal jargon inside jokes what's the lore what are the what are the stories from your founding that you tell over and over and over again that

help Define the history of the company you're creating right now what are the behaviors what are the ways that you just expect people to show up in the sort of casual everyday moments in a meeting in the hallway in a hallway at an off site what are the rituals what are the ways you start your day the ways you finish a project the um the things that you do when you're at whenever you're together maybe you always go bowling and the standard practices so what are the steps of work that you're engaged in in ways that you're sort of defining standard operating procedures for your company and so when you look at these things it's actually easy to see that everyone in the company can impact culture everyone can either reinforce or undermine these things that you're creating

but there are some groups that have a special influence on culture so I want to talk about those briefly you've got tenured employees so that might mean a couple of months at this point for some of you but the people who have been with your company the longest are going to be the ones who are reinforcing the ways that you work the ways that you show up and that new employees are going to look to to see signals for how they should show up too teams who are at the center of the business so as product driven companies a lot of this for you will be Eng teams product teams people who are really driving the progress forward at the company have an outsized impact on the culture with their preferences and the ways that they work when you get to this admins and EAS have

a huge impact on the culture because they hold the keys to everyone's schedules and they can impact who meets with whom when how often and what those meetings look like and then finally I'm talking to you today because no one has a bigger impact on culture than Founders and founding teams and you can see the direct influence if you look at any founder-led company um when you when you think about coinbase we have a self-professed introvert as a founder and we've built a culture that is super friendly to introverts we have a culture that focuses on written feedback over discussion we have a culture where Interruption is unacceptable in meetings and that's directly because of the influence of Brian our founder so all of these other groups listed here and everyone else at your company is

going to look to you as the founder to set the standard for what the culture is and that's your responsibility and your privilege as a Founder to figure out what you want that to be so now that I've done all the sort of definitional work what have we learned at coinbase about culture over the last five years so there are five big lessons for us that I think we've we've uncovered um all of these better late than never you can do them anytime but order does matter and so I'm going to start with the things that are most important for you to start with first and I'm going to work my way towards things that are maybe a little bit more useful a little further on in your Arc of growth so I'm going to start with the one thing that you need to do before anything else when

you think about culture and that is write it down so a source of Truth for what you want your culture to be is vital especially in a remote first or a hybrid company where people aren't picking that up organically from one another so our story here at coinbase when we were 500 people we started the work of defining our culture Doc and 500 people is late uh we started because we were starting to feel cultural drift we were starting to feel the culture pull away from what we had intended for it to be but starting this work early can really benefit you for a couple of reasons it clarifies your thinking so if you try to write something down you will understand better what you think about it it will uncover misalignment you might have with other members of your founding

team so maybe you think that feedback should be just should be delivered in public maybe your co-founder thinks it should only be delivered in private better to discover those things on the front end than when you're in the trenches together you can use whatever you write down as a bat signal to the people you are trying to seek to join your team if you have a crisp understanding of the culture you're trying to create you can signal that to the candidates you're talking to to entice them to join your team transparent people are going to look for transparent cultures and it influences the early kind of feedback you might give people who are already on your team so if you know what your culture if you know what you want your culture to be you can use that as sort of an anchor when you think about

the feedback that you're giving to the people around you to help them more closely align to it so again to get started start with a blank Google doc write down how you want your company to work some of those rituals those Norms those uh stories that you want to define the culture you're creating don't worry about getting it right you will promise you will update it you will change it you will evolve it um the lesson here is just get started so next Once you have written something down it's time to change it be flexible um changing your mind and changing your culture is a good thing as long as you're doing it grounded in data so the coinbase story on this front um we had a big change that hit us really early in covid a few years before

2020 we had actually made the decision that the only and best way to be maximally productive as a company was actually to have everyone on site together so we had had a handful of people scattered around the country we had actually brought them into our offices because we believe that that was the best way to do the best work was having everyone in the same place and of course kovid totally undid that we were all doing this remote work work from home experiment all of a sudden all at once and after a few months we found that it was actually working that we did not feel less productive than we had when we were in the office and we were open to that lesson we were open to that learning and we actually changed our policy we decided to be a remote first company forever a couple of months into

covet and so being flexible in the face of that lesson allowed us to distinguish ourselves as an employer it allowed us to draw Talent from all of the world that we would not have been able to hire if we were forcing everyone to come into the office every day so when you think about the culture that you're trying to create it's okay that it it's not static it shouldn't be your company is going to grow your culture can grow with it but remember to be clear about that and when you think about how you want to capture that consider adding a change log to your culture doc or however you're recording thoughts around your culture and actually recording what changed and why about what you want your culture to be

having that always on continuous source of truth will ensure that you actually use this thing and it's not a doc that just dies off in a Google drive somewhere so as you hone your sense of what you want your culture to be and maybe evolve it over time it's really important to communicate it to your people so especially when you're starting out communicating early with maybe not even the full story is actually more important than waiting to have everything buttoned up in a neat little package before communicating it to your employees so we went remote in March of 2020 like I said uh because of everyone working from home and we decided we were going to be remote first forever in May 2020 like three months later and when we communicated that we had

almost no answers about what that would actually mean for employees we knew we had the decision we knew we were committed to it but there was a lot we didn't know and we communicated that to employees too because there was so much that was uncertain in that moment we decided it was more important to create the clarity we could for employees even if not everything was clear then wait until we had that complete story packaged up and I mean compare that to some companies 18 months into covet who still didn't know what their remote work policy was with now employees all over the country who were just keeping their fingers crossed they weren't going to get called back into the office at some point so when you communicate clearly in the good times for the positive messages that kind of earns you the ability to be

equally transparent with the tough messages and when you can sort of train your team train your company to be used to that again that's one of those things that can sort of smooth out the Peaks and valleys of crypto make it easier for everyone to live with so as an example we've since evolved our remote first policy we have said some some roles need to be in office and we communicated that clearly and even though it wasn't like the greatest message to deliver some people weren't super happy about it we were able to deliver it clearly and employees appreciated that Clarity even if it wasn't the message they necessarily wanted to hear so develop the habit of communicating sooner rather than later and even if employees don't love the message they will appreciate the clarity that you

bring to it um Junior versus later so so far we've talked a lot about words now we're going to talk about actions so Lesson Four is for the culture you now have on paper to actually be the culture of your company you need to integrate that those words those ideas into the systems of your company so we've done this at coinbase by reshaping the hiring process with our culture in mind we've created a pre-hiring manager screen assessment that is intended to see how well someone's going to fit with our culture how successful they will be as part of our culture and this is related to an earlier point I made about culture as a bat signal so you want to transmit what that culture

is to people out in the world so the right people can be attracted to your company if you don't do that if you don't demonstrate what you want your culture to be No One's Gonna Know and you're not you're not doing any of that filtering on the front end and you have to do it all in your recruiting process so you know a Google doc with thoughts on what your culture should be that you don't share with your recruiter or that they're not using to have their conversations doesn't actually do you any good in that part of the employee life cycle so when you think about your employee user Journey so things like hiring onboarding reviews promotions think about how you can inject culture into each of those steps so you know for example reviewing someone's Performance Based on pieces of the culture that you think are important

for them to demonstrate so the last lesson is the toughest and hopefully you have some practice with culture work before you have to get here but it's to realign your culture when you needed to so when your culture is moving away from the one that you want it's again your responsibility as a Founder founding team leadership team to realign it with what you want it to be so back in 2018 our mission statement at coinbase was to build an open Financial system for the world that was and is true but as hiring accelerated as we started moving into hyper growth a lot of people who joined the company interpreted that message differently from what we meant they assumed based on those words that we

were going to start in developing markets that we were going to go intervene around the world in places where fiat currency was broken and that's never been our strategy and we had a bunch of people now who wanted to be our strategy or thought it was when they joined so we did a couple of things to realign we actually rewrote the mission statement to more accurately reflect what we wanted to do which was to build economic freedom we started building deep dives into the culture and strategy into onboarding so even if someone managed to make it through hiring with a misconception about the work that we were doing or how they wouldn't get very far into their employee Journey before having that clarity we communicated with employees we told them what we were changing and why we were changing it

and not everyone was super happy with the change but we created the clarity we were all better off for knowing exactly what we were doing we're able to align and we were tracking more closely to the culture that we wanted so when this happens and it's probably a when not an if as a leader it is your responsibility to bring the culture back in line and whether you can manage it with communication or you need to take some action like we did cultural drift doesn't resolve itself it'll just get worse and worse and worse so you intervene to course correct or that culture will become your new culture all right in summary Five Lessons write it down

be flexible communicate clearly follow through and realign when needed these have emerged over the last five years not because we've always gotten these right sometimes we're getting these wrong or not listening to the lessons that we thought we had already learned and we figured out in retrospect what we should have done differently so I'm going to share a couple of examples of where we've stumbled for some of these lessons so when we didn't write it down about a year into remote work one of the biggest pain points for employees was meeting overload everyone's calendars were just constantly jammed with meetings and worse we had developed this like West Coast centralized scheduling habit so all the meetings were happening you know 9 A.M PT to 6 PM PT which was absolutely miserable for anyone on the East Coast

or anywhere else in the world and it was only then a year in that we realized we should probably write down some meeting Norms as a remote first company and we did and they helped but it was definitely slower going slower progress a slower adjustment to those ways of working than it would have been if the month or the year we went remote we had said to ourselves hey we should probably write down some media Norms so people know how to schedule meetings and how to have meetings in the most productive way when we weren't flexible enough so last summer 2022 lots of Big Industry change uh at coinbase this meant taking a look at our expenses seeing how we were deploying our resources most effectively and we

ended up cutting our off-site budget in half for the remainder of the year and as a remote first company we really believe in the importance of getting together in person periodically it's super super important so when our budget got cut in half our priority this is my team my team's priority was how do we get the most number of people to off-sites no matter what this year and that meant creating like a pretty rigid program where we standardized everything we were trying to find economies of scale and like the hotels weren't that nice and the dates weren't that flexible because we really were focused on getting everyone to these off-sites and it didn't work it wasn't right for our culture it wasn't flexible enough for us it was okay for some teams but it really wasn't okay for

others and so lesson learned for us this year when we designed our off-site strategy we designed it to be more flexible and that might mean fewer people end up at off-sites this year but the overall experience is going to be better so when we didn't communicate clearly at coinbase um we're all about pithiness we love a brief statement we love a brief email slack like fewer words the better um and that's sort of the principle that we adopted when we wrote our first culture doc and as a result some of the language that we used was misinterpreted so we have a tenet of clear communication but taken to its extreme clear communication can look like

bluntness it can look like being demanding it can look like being rude even and so what we found was we had we had been clear in our own minds about what we meant when we said clear communication but what we really needed was to unpack those ideas and add a lot more concrete advice concrete examples for employees so that they knew when we said clear communication what we actually met was don't say the same thing twice in an email not make unreasonable demands of your colleagues so um while we have learned most of these lessons and made some of these mistakes as a mostly remote company these are applicable whether you're hybrid whether you're entirely in person whether you

are remote and I have now spent a bunch of time on Theory so I'm going to end with some actionable tips and a plan so a couple of things to keep in mind as you start to think about this work for yourself and your team avoid Culture by committee so this is the I was saying this last night this is the path to blah this is a way to please everyone and be entirely indistinct in who you are as an organization culture should be distinct even shocking to borrow a Ben Horowitz term and it won't be for everyone and that's okay I encourage you to be brave with the choices you make for your culture I just kind of got this but beware weaponization of your culture people are going to throw your high level language

back at you like I'm just trying to be clear with my communications so don't be afraid to push back and say that's actually not what we mean when we say clear Communications don't be afraid to push back and clarify what you do and don't mean by all this stuff avoid framework overload and I this is this is blasphemy from someone who has been doing this work for like 10 years but avoid too many Frameworks don't worry about values and behaviors and cultural tenets and a mission and division just start somewhere pick something and start somewhere start clarifying your thinking get one framework really really clear for yourselves you can worry about filling in the rest of it later and just get started so even if you're just writing an anti-doc where all you're doing is capturing your cultural

grievances from past companies you've worked at that you never want to be true of your own just start there and then you can work your way into what you do want your culture to be so to help with that last one around just getting started I'm going to give you like a little mini plan that you can copy to launch your own culture work so none of the following items should take you more than an hour and if you can get this all done in a month you will have gotten a major head start on this work and set yourself up for success in the long term with respect to your culture so four steps get data so host an open conversation over lunch about what makes your culture today distinct from places people have worked in the past this could be with your whole team this could be with your

co-founder this could be with some advisors some people who are close to the organization and it'll also tell you where some Initial Ideas you might have about what you want your culture to be are already true and where they might be aspirational capture your thoughts so that's the just get started piece sit down maybe work with two or three people Max but bullet out what you want your culture to be what is the language what is the lore what are the rituals that you want for your culture how do you want to feel to work at your company and the stronger the choice the better identify which of those things you have now just written down are aspirational and which are true today you probably have a gut sense of this but good to get second and third opinions from other

people on your team um you can have a whole open conversation with people understand with the intention of like stack ranking which of these things you're already doing today and which will take a little bit more focused effort from you and then finally this gets back to the sort of weaponization of culture people throwing language in your face get specific identify three to five concrete behaviors you want to see for each of those bullets you've now written about your culture So when you say efficient execution does that mean we ship things at 80 does that mean we don't care about proofreading does that mean no project should take longer than three weeks from here you can do more pressure testing you can start introducing these ideas to your team and build them into

the systems of your company the important thing here as I've now said probably a dozen times is just getting started it's not about worrying that you're going to get things right and we're still doing this at coinbase we're still experimenting with things around how to make people maximally productive how to do async work the best how to connect in person in a way that's effective for a remote first company I will not tell you how many Google Docs I have socked away noodling about coinbase culture but I will tell you that this is a journey you're going to be on for the life of your company and that starting early pays off it'll give you a culture that's clear that's distinct that gets and keeps the right people with you so I hope you will experiment with a couple of things we've talked about

today and reach out to me and let me know and uh I think that's it so thank you so much for your time and we'll move to q a shortly thanks I lead people at uniswap Labs before we sort of get into the Q a I will share a little context on my background so you all know what pointed questions to ask me so well I talk I'm going to share some images from our uniswap culture Workshop we did at our on-site in January just so you have something kind of pretty going well I tell you my story um so let's see I joined uniswap last summer after spending five years at

coinbase four of those with Daisy um I guess my sort of quick two-minute elevator story is I was recruited out of my MFA sculpture program to work at a Quant hedge fund which is a separate story we can talk about later um but I got really excited about the intersection of people and Tech at the Quant hedge fund which was called the Esha but I wasn't that passionate at the end of the day about minting money for wealthy people so that's when I pivoted over to Tech and fintech I spent a couple years at venmo as the right hand to their chro and got them from around probably 40 to 150 and then helped with the PayPal venmo integration

then I decided I wanted to go really early stage and kind of build all the things myself so I went to a little tiny early stage fintech startup called Bond Street where it was 10 people I was Leading the People function and sort of you know growing the people as we went and we got actually probably close to where uniswap is today and we're really struggling to raise our series beat and that was when coinbase and a couple of other acquirers started sniffing around to potentially acquire Bond streets so coinbase didn't acquire Bond Street but they did acquire me so I joined coinbase uh when it was around 100 employees back in 2017.

and we effectively 50xed from there uh and coinbase now has sort of settled back down to I think a head count of around 3 500. but in my time there I was the third HR hire I sort of built and ran their HR business partner team I built some sort of core parts of their M A integration function and then most recently was leading executive comp in sort of my journey at uniswap so far I think I sort of joined at the perfect time because so many of our kind of people and culture building blocks very germane to what Daisy was talking about have not yet been built so we're really using our culture doc or our culture code as like

the Armature or the operating system on which to build all of the other critical pieces of sort of people and culture infrastructure as we grow so that's kind of where we are in our journey and uh yeah I think we can turn it over for a q a we've heard there's going to be a lot so you guys got to deliver that's right all right thanks for the talk so I've got a question um in the beginning when you're a small startup you know documenting culture it's kind of like a top-down process but as you add employees and you grow and you evolve how do you get feedback and then make decisions about how your your culture might be shifting and more

inclusive of the the whole population yeah I think there's a I think there's probably a a sweet spot there because I think when you're when we were 500 people doing this it was like messy it was you know we started top down and then we got some bottom-up input I think the way that we did it that that was actually successful was we had the exec team choose a couple of delegates each so we had each exact team member pick a couple of sort of culture Keepers that they saw in the organization to come give feedback we knew that if we gave sort of decision rights over the culture doc to 500 people it was going to be a true mess so what we ended up doing was picking that sort of tight tight group of folks who were trusted in the organization and it was kind of a

top-down bottom-up hybrid because we were intentionally picking the people that were rising stars or heirs apparent to these senior leadership roles not necessarily seen them senior themselves but high potential folks and saying like ah Jesse Pollock is someone who we think could be a important cultural force in the future of coinbase let's get him into the conversation so I think you can be a little bit choosy about who you bring in it's going to depend on the size if you're only a 50 person company you probably can have a full team conversation about the culture you want to have and figure out where the hot spots are where your where your teams have passion when you're an order of magnitude bigger you probably need to be a little bit more choosy on how you do that which I don't know what would you add yeah this has actually been sort of

a really fun journey in my time at uniswap so I came to uniswap sort of with my you know coinbase operating system still in place and coinbase is like a very more top-down kind of structure than uniswap and very like efficient execution by Nature so I came in and I was like okay great priority let's make a Coulter Doc and I sort of started to do it you know in the coinbase way whereas like me and the rest of the leadership team kind of like writing it down and putting it out there and then it was actually a conversation with the CEO MC who I think spoke to you all a couple weeks ago and like we took a beat and said oh wait like you know how would we build this if it was based

on the sort of like values of uniswap which is you know structured around essentially the values of ethereum right like open decentralized so the result was you know some of the images you saw on the slide a couple slides back it was like we did like a full 100 person team workshop where we like broke the team into different groups and sort of really dug deep on like okay what's aspirational in terms of our culture like what do we want to see more of what do we want to see less of and started the kind of like co-created journey of our culture dog and that felt much more natural to us and was like a really valuable learning moment for me in my like coinbase uniswap integration great thank you

hi this is animal from blogcast um I have two questions um so the first one is you mentioned that Brian himself is an introvert and then it creates more like introvert friendly working environment I wonder were there any concrete examples about that how that would be more introvert friendly and also do you see the difference between Duo attract more introverts in different functions um yeah yeah I think yeah and maybe I zip through these really quickly when I was giving giving the talk but I think one example is written feedback like feedback in documents instead of through conversation so we are a culture we're very much a culture of documentation and so even like decision making will be

captured in we have a couple of decision making Frameworks sort of templates that we use including one called a rapid so we will actually present a problem in a documented format and then tag in all of the people who need to weigh in on that problem and invite them to share their feedback and that is how we both make and document a decision and I think that that's more introvert friendly because you know maybe introverts don't feel as comfortable or as willing to sort of speak up and raise their hand and share a strong opinion in a live meeting but they might feel much more comfortable doing so at the company in the comfort of their own desk so I think that's one example of how we've done it and then yeah and in terms of whether we attract more introverts it's a great question I

think it's probably a balance I think we probably attract more introverts than if we had a super extroverted culture but I don't know that it feels wildly imbalanced I don't think we're like a 90 introverted company I think the reality is um and you know this like there's been a lot of writing on this but like a lot of the the value of being an introvert a lot of what introverts tend to bring to the table can be really meaningful and valuable for extroverts too and so I think it benefits pretty much I mean having a culture where interrupting each other is not acceptable in meetings is like that benefits everybody not just introverts so I think those are a couple examples I don't know if you'd have any other you were a little close to hiring so a little closer to her than I was so

I think I would probably say one thing that I always thought was really cool about sort of Brian's approach is his self-awareness like he was like so um open about the fact that he was an introvert and that a lot of our like ways of working were structured around that sort of default mode of his that I think it also in our like various eras of building the leadership team made him very self-aware about like what maybe he needed more of and what he wanted to dial up in the leadership hires we made along the way so his kind of like calling out and structuring the company in that way also enabled us to build I would say like a stronger and more diverse leadership team where I would say Emily for example

like really balances Brian's introvert qualities quite well got it and then thank you the second question is related to remote working so what made you decide to go they follow a remote and do you see any productivity shift um at that that size of the com company yeah I think well your second question first I think it's such an interesting question and I honestly don't think that anyone has cracked measurement of productivity across an Enterprise it's something that everyone's trying to figure out I think a lot of people are making wild claims about it I haven't seen any substantiation that people that like across an entire company across every function generally speaking people are more or less productive when they're remote so I think that's kind of like a Golden Goose for someone to go figure

out how to solve because I think you can say like is the is the end team doing more end work are the recruiting team doing more hiring but it's hard to say like over and above you know like functional lines is everyone more productive or not I think what we have what we believe is that people are not less productive and I think what remote offers is more flexibility and an ability to tap into hiring pools that we wouldn't have access to if we only had offices where we ever had offices which was San Francisco Portland Chicago and New York in the U.S we can hire people in Miami that don't want to leave Miami so I would say that and you're sorry your first question was oh what made you want to go fully we might just want to go around yeah I mean

I think that was part of it was experiencing a lack of productivity drop in the beginning of the pandemic so we found that we could be as productive or you know the sort of the felt perception was we were as productive remote As we were in person and we wanted to in some ways embrace the principles of crypto in terms of decentralization in terms of you know we we off we say we don't have a headquarters now we are a decentralized company and that means we should be able to hire anywhere and we believe that you know Talent is not is uh Talent is equally distributed across the world and so we don't want to hire only the people who want to move to San Francisco New York Chicago Portland wherever we might have offices and this enables us to do that

go there thank you thanks I guess I would say uniswap by comparison is more of a hybrid model so we do have an HQ in New York and about half the team is there and then the rest are distributed so I find we're sort of like really thoughtful about what we try to get done where like okay if I'm in New York for two weeks then you know I'll do a lot of like high collaborative interactive work and try to get all of that done in that period of time whereas if I have a lot of like Focus Project work that's more what I do when I'm remote but obviously you can't you can always do that but I think that's kind of the way the way we're structuring it this has been super timely because we're planning our first off-site so I'm trying to figure out like what actually

goes into constructing an effective off-site what percent is just play versus actually getting work done like I saw your pictures beautiful pictures like I'm trying to figure out like the balance I use chat GPT to make an outline for our off-site right so I'm trying to help fill up the gaps and figure out what to do if you have any tips on that so many tips well we should definitely like come find me afterwards I'd like love to dig in with you I mean what do you want what do you want to get out of the offset what's your objective we have a couple Milestones that we want to hit um so getting the team aligned on that and um getting everybody like equipped with our culture what we're doing our background getting to know each other as people you know beyond keyboards I think

it's like a great start but I'm trying to think like if there's any like activities that we do like I saw your pictures again like you know like more of those things yeah yeah I mean I think that it sounds like you've got a bit of a spectrum of things you want to achieve but that alignment maybe is a big one of those and so I think bringing people together in activities where they're sort of maybe experiencing that alignment before they necessarily feel it so like you know like dumb team building activities have existed for decades for a reason so like find the least cringe one that you want to engage in and sort of poke around with that um but yeah let's let's brainstorm afterwards I don't know you have initial thoughts yeah I would strongly plus one the sort of like be clear up front with the West rest of

your team on sort of like what you're solving for like what you're trying to get out of the off site and I think general rule of thumb is like a good mix of types of ways of showing up for the team is really helpful like if there's something really important you want to educate them on great you know there's some version of the some form of the offsite where you're talking at them but then follow that immediately right with something more interactive where they're learning about one another they're kind of like getting more reps with each other and like building trust and Community as you go I think I could probably even if you want to see like the sort of like rough outline for our last uniswap off-site happy to share that that'd be great and then my last question is because we're working remote something that we do

every single morning is like in our daily stand-up channel on slack we kind of like talk about what we did yesterday what we plan to do today what our blockers are it's sort of like a framework we've put in place to kind of keep everybody on the same page on what everybody's executing on Curious is there anything like that in addition that we could maybe include is that a good idea to do anything else that comes to mind that you've seen from your experience working remote yeah I love that I think yeah I think that kind of daily ritual is like is super powerful and I think it keeps people it does keep people aligned and it sounds like you're also doing periodic in-person connection which I as you've heard me say I think is super super important um yeah I mean I think some of what I

talked about in terms of and you know key just alluded to this with respect to off-sites but Clarity of intention Clarity of objective is super important and I think it's easy for people in a remote environment to sort of get down into their respective rabbit holes and like focused very sort of nearsightedly on like the tasks that are in front of them so as a Founder part of a founding Team part of what I think you can do is help them pull up out of the weeds occasionally and maybe this is weekly maybe this is monthly but where where and how do you want to reinforce some of those fundamentals some of those fundamental Milestones that maybe you just mentioned you're going to talk about in your offsite or some of those goals that you have that you're focused on or even like the mission the sort of

ultimate you know achievement that you're looking for as as a company I think that you hopefully are the are the person who has sort of the bandwidth and the Brain space to do that as the at the at the company so I would just think about how you want to bring that and that could be a similar you know like slack-based ritual that could be like a little micro all hands that you have or virtual happy hour you know forced fun everyone's favorite cool um good thank you can bring that in I'd be curious if you could share some of the tips on how to like like really use culture as as a productivity and Performance Tool and whether even like the concept of people culture is actually at this early stage maybe takes

away from that and it's more so like a hidden context of all of the practice or some of the practices that you described and um I'm just I guess I'm worried about like being Naval gazing into culture so early on when actually all that matters is performance yeah I mean I think that I think the simple truth is that you your company already has a culture you already have one and the question is just how intentional do you want to be about it and how clear do you want to be about it and like yeah like we were someone asked a question about this yesterday but you could you could choose not to engage with this work like not doing this work is not going to stop you from getting stuff done but I think that it's an investment that you're making early on even if you're not even if it's

not about changing anything now even if it's just about capturing that performance-based culture that you are already cultivating inside your org then I think that is equally valuable as outlining the sort of like this big aspirations that you would need to put dozens of hours of work into with your entire team to achieve so I think you know you're gonna you're you will you do you will have a culture and so I think Naval Naval gazing like yes I think in the same way that like outlining a product strategy is sort of like you could just you could just run right without without putting things down on paper but clarifying that will clarify your thinking will clarify your action and I think um I would also encourage you to think about the connection between this work and the way you measure success so if

you have someone on your team who achieves all of their goals but is an in the process like is that okay with you it could it could be that's a choice you could make but clarifying that for everyone in the company is more helpful than just letting that one be that one and everyone else be upset about it if that makes sense and in the transition that code base did at the time when it's at like business first none of the like social stuff yeah uh what what are the some of the lessons from there so many lessons um yeah I think that this kind of comes back to a couple of things that I mentioned in my talk one is around um creating a culture of transparency for the good moments and the hard moments I think that I don't think we 100 nailed the change management around

that decision I think we probably could have done it better but I will say that I think ultimately that decision was aligned with the culture that Brian wanted to cultivate and he knew it was going to be an unpopular decision and he knew that it was going to be an unpopular move and decided that on balance it was better to be clear than to allow the kind of friction in the company that he would he and many of us were experiencing at that time and so I guess you know I said earlier you know be brave about your choices around culture and I I would just underscore that I think that know that you're not going to please all the people all the time but that's one I think of the reasons you'd want to do this work sooner rather than later is you can cat

you know today a message like that at a company of 10 people might lose one person if you wait until you're 500 people to do that you might lose 50 people 100 people and so getting that Clarity early will make sure you've got the right people in the mix who are aligned with that culture who want to be part of that culture actively so I don't know what do would you add anything to that or you were here for this chapter of coinbase I was yeah I was leading our HR business partner team when Brian sort of made that mission first decision and I to be honest was a big disagree and commit on that decision um in that I think I was thinking about it through the lens of if it were like key.com and I was running coinbase that maybe isn't the culture that I would

have built however over the subsequent years I actually sort of was humbled in some ways and I think I learned a lot from that decision of Brian's in that he was successful in like transparently executing on the culture that he wanted to build so well it maybe isn't the decision I would make it was like one of probably the most valuable like learning experiences of my career sort of seeing him do that and then like you know demonstrate that it did actually work to your first question around performance I think you know as you're articulating your values and your own kind of culture code I think it's useful to Daisy's earlier talk to just make it as simple as

possible but if you sort of make it simple and authentic and clear and then even use those principles or those values to tell the team how you're thinking about performance and how you're measuring performance I think they will appreciate that Clarity and like the more you can kind of you know use your culture as like the through line for everything you're building from a people perspective like that will resonate with your team because it will feel true cool thank you yeah and just to add to that I would say like the culture shouldn't feel extra on top of other stuff you're doing it should feel completely aligned with it so if part of your if one of the pieces of your culture code is efficient execution then you should be rewarding people for really good efficient execution and you

should be giving them constructive feedback if they are not executing efficiently so it should feel like that I guess and maybe that's part of what you mean when you say authentic like it should be consistent across the way that you operate and then it won't feel and then it'll be an accelerator to the work that you do and not um a decelerator to you know this the speed that you're trying to operate with I'm curious speaking of uh unique cultures what are some distinct cultural Traditions at coinbase and uniswap one of my favorite uh Traditions which I I will admit has sort of fallen off but it was something that we used to do that I really really loved um was a weekly series at which uh which was called coinbase matters I think I

think this was inspired by a similar series I think at Columbia that they do where any coinbase employee would just get up and talk in like a little conference room and just talk about any topic they were passionate about for like 10 20 minutes I think I give a presentation on Nicholas Cage once um I think I can you remember I haven't tested I'm sure I gave one on hot dogs at some point like but it was like every but like people were really intensely vulnerable people talked about like their adoption stories people talked about like family histories people talked about hot dogs and Nicholas Cage and it was this moment where especially a cross-functional lines which maybe you don't uh you know as someone on the people team I don't often work really closely with like line level Engineers um getting to know those people on like

an intensely personal level like within a half an hour was a really amazing experience I think we've now recently implemented something that kind of Echoes this which is um monthly sort of virtual social contests at coinbase so Brian kicked this off last year with a virtual um contest around our social Battle Stations slack channel so everyone's took pictures of their work set up at home and I think like the best one as voted by emojis got one East and we just did another contest around a health and fitness challenge which was like amazing you know people people who were like posting about their meditation practices or training for a marathon or like skydiving it was just a way that we've

sort of like hacked the uh isolation of remote first and like found a way for people to become really vulnerable and intimate in like a very quick way so I'm really liking that these days yeah um yeah I think at some point I maybe did a presentation on uh bending neon sculpture which I do and my sort of side life and I think it yeah at some point maybe we screened my stop-motion short which was really fun um at uniswap like one of I would say are unstated values in putting people first is kind of like around creating Whimsy and like being a little bit like absurd uh so early days uh Hayden and

team they like started something they called White claw Wednesdays and they would only drink pink white claws because pink unicorns obviously and that has evolved into Wednesdays like people concocting creative pink often disgusting drinks that everyone drinks together um and then like on the opposite end of the spectrum Hayden himself is a little bit of an introvert and uh like sort of likes quiet collaborative work so we got like one of those giant like five by five foot puzzles that is of the Unicorn tapestry at The Cloisters in New York and like the team I think it's on Thursdays we'll just like get together and like do a puzzle and then once we were finished with the puzzle Hayden

took everyone to The Cloisters to like have drinks and celebrate so it's like things across the whole spectrum that kind of just like embody things that are authentic to us it sounds fantastic thank you I am Michael I actually was at coinbase until basically this program so I went through the transition to remote which I thought actually was was great so thank you both for your yeah tell us tell me what yeah what did we get Ron okay tell the real story yeah it was actually it was um it was authentically organic I'll put it that way it was like you know it wasn't 100 smooth but felt felt good and and you were you know you felt like you were part of the part of the growth of the company which is great um but yeah so while I was there I had the opportunity to work with a few

different teams and one thing I noticed was the culture between like um the consumer side or the retail side and the institutional side was very different um so like how do you think about subcultures um and you know like do you think about it in terms of like dunbar's number for tribes or there's like some of the natural separations and product teams you know smaller numbers or bigger numbers yeah like how do you think of that in question and I think it's it is it is a natural consequence at some point of scale um I do strongly believe that subcultures should be you know uh at least cousins if not sisters to one another I think like any further than that and you start to actually fracture the way that you work and it starts to be really challenging to work across

functions when you have these sort of radically different values and cultures you know between like finance and insta um and so yeah I think part of it part of it is influenced by the personality of the team lead so it's sort of like the mini founder effect right like if the founder has a significant impact on the culture of the company the leader of a team is going to have sort of like a next order down sort of version of that influence um and part of that I think is it's on us as a people team and as a people leadership team to ensure that we are doing enough sort of cultural um mind-melding with all of those leaders so with all of the leaders of all of the product functions that there is a critical mass of consistency and

like there's always going to be a little bit of difference there you know like different personalities you know we have introverts extroverts people have been a long time at the company people who've just joined people who come from tradvy people who come from Tech like all of that is going to influence the subculture but I think this to me is an indication of like the importance of like leadership development and like leadership training at these companies where when you have these little micro orgs in some cases not so micro um they need to have some level of consistency with the sort of Enterprise culture otherwise you're just running a bunch of companies at once and I suspect you'll be less efficient for it what would you what would you say about that yeah I think it maybe is a little bit connected to what we touched on earlier

around like understanding like where your team or your leaders sort of spike in where their gaps are I think the key to it is sort of like you know maximizing the superpowers of the various tribes and like getting them to sort of like you know bring one another up in the areas where they're strong we didn't always get this right at coinbase early on in my days there we um we hired a team in Chicago out of tradvi to build this like souped-up low latency matching engine that very much resembled uh the kinds of engines they were building on Wall Street and I think we built that team so fast and so specifically from this other world that it did very much

become a sort of tribun to itself and we actually ultimately weren't successful I like integrating it with the rest of the company for that reason however you know like never you know let a mistake not be useful right so we like learned from what we did wrong there and then applied it to our sort of subsequent builds I spent a lot of time at coinbase thinking about mergers and Acquisitions and like integrating teams when we brought them on board and that was typically sort of like the key to teams that were successful versus not like were we able to maximize the superpowers of that team and integrate them well versus if you more often than not sort of leave that tribe unto itself like

untended to those tend not to work as well got it makes sense and then how how are things shaping up at uniswap because like with this decentralized approach and sounds like kind of at the size where some of these pockets might be forming like how are you approaching that yeah so uh we just launched our wallet product as many of you know that was a long a journey in the making and um we fought with Apple for quite some time and I'm very very pleased that it's out in the world though I think yeah over the course of that build like we definitely like you know we 3xed in that time period and very much found around the like 60 to 80 person threshold that it was like feeling harder to get stuff

done and like the size of the teams and the pods that we were working on started to feel a little bit unwieldy and that was around the time um when I was interviewing with uniswap and they were contemplating like huh okay the way we are working today isn't like delivering what we would like to accomplish maybe we need to sort of restructure or we rethink about the our ways of working from a product engineering and design perspective so we sort of like Shuffle the teams around which created some short-term noise but enabled us now to ship much faster and we've also started I think to the previous question to like create more um specific ways of communicating and collaborating to Daisy's Point around

like okay wait we need to write it down we need to sort of like explicitly uh perform and embody the the behaviors that we think will lead us to become ultimately successful so we're getting like a little bit more crisp like not corporate of course Hayden would never let us do that but I think a little more formalized in the way the ways we work together got it thanks I'm gonna jump in here with a question um one that came up a lot at coinbase and I'm sure comes up with all companies no matter what the size it's just sort of the slack culture you know whether it's slack or teams or whatever you may use um you know when is the right time to start kind of encoding like I don't know

rules principles around that um I know at coinbase we probably put it in too late um and it was really really tough to do that but just curious what you guys thoughts on that yeah another example I think of you know um some real strong opinions across our exec team that I as at the time as a head of internal comms was like deeply uncomfortable with like the decision to lock down a slack Channel because it was too noisy and I was like there's gonna be so much backlash and there was but ultimately it was the right thing to do um I think that there are sort of layers here I think there's um there is never it's never too early to think about sort of like good citizenship on slack and that's true whether you're a team of two or 20 or

200 or 2000 it's like you know what are what how do you want people just to show up like do you have expectations that they're going to respond within an hour do you want people to be at hearing and giant channels and sort of pulling attention away from whatever anyone else is doing what do you think about having social slack channels if you're a remote if you're a remote company probably makes sense so some of the sort of like Baseline ways of showing up on slack I think like again another thing that you could probably come up with in an hour if you wanted to sit down and think about it I think some of the sort of broader principles like some of the things we've done at coinbase as we've scaled significantly so you know channels on slack that have thousands of people on them we've been increasingly

liberal about making those channels sort of read-only or sort of one to many and so I would definitely encourage you to think about that and really build a head of scale um the transition is never going to be easy but it'll be easier the sooner you do it so so taking a channel like if you had a slack channel that was specifically focused on asking the leadership team questions we had something like this at slack coinbase when I joined um and you know three years later I think sort of right around the time Kim joined we had um we made the decision to shut that channel down and because that we had sort of implicitly created an expectation that any employee could ask any question of any executive in the company and expect an answer on a reasonable timetable and the exec team

doesn't scale with the company so like we're now talking about thousands of people asking seven people questions and it just wasn't practical and so we had to sort of remake the way that we were thinking about that that's not going to be your problem for some time I mean it would be great if if you guys got to that stage very very quickly but it'll it'll take a little bit for you to get to the thousands of employees stage so as hard as it is to think about ahead of time I would say the sooner you can think about how you want to operate at scale the better but it's definitely going to be a balance as you as you grow and as you think about this stuff how are you guys think about this at uniswap yeah seems like you have a very vibrant

slack culture we do have a very vibrant slack culture I think I would Echo Daisy's Point like sort of scaling your approach to like slack and communication sort of commensurate with your growth growth plan makes a ton of sense we've been like a little bit you know open and I would say sort of decentralized in our approach to slack like we have set principles for how we expect people to show up on slack but we don't we haven't like locked down channels as yet we're not sort of like yet taking any sort of a policing approach and we're kind of defaulting to trust hoping that you know the values and the principles we've set around how people show up for one another and like

what it means to put people first will mean that the team will be respectful to one another so we're hoping that scales we have recently moved from in our All Hands we do allow anyone to ask questions but to submit them in advance they used to be anonymous and we found that wasn't really cultivating the ownership mindset we wanted so now they're attributed to the person and we actually if the person wants to we encourage them to ask the question live so they can kind of like own the inquiry with us and it's more of a discussion but we're still tiny so it's easy great well thank you so much Daisy and key that was great thanks guys thank you [Applause]

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