This was one of the most exhausting but useful
parts of this past quarter. Between job interviews and interviews for our
Jim Collins case study, I was interviewing with up to ten or twelve people a
week--for me, this was a bit exhausting. Perhaps I should have been a
little more selective with my interview choices, but I felt that it was very
important for me to select the right job. One thing that came out of this
was that I am not intimidated by many people anymore. I was asking
challenging questions to CEOs and not getting nervous. CEOs and executives
are really just like anybody else--there is no reason to set them apart from me.
I also learned about a lot of the problems start-up companies are facing.
The most common one was how to preserve culture when your company has to grow at
an extreme pace. I am not sure if any of the companies I talked to had a
solid answer of how to deal with that. But all of the start-ups did have
an emphasis on "good culture". Most of the time, when culture
was talked about, the "We have a ping-pong table!" comment always came
up. I think every start-up owns a ping-pong table. I don't
understand. It is almost as if having a ping-pong table is the symbol for
"We have culture". I think it is more like "Costco delivers
and we can get a ping-pong table along with our big plastic tub of cheetos."
Not that having a ping-pong table is bad, but I feel that culture is more than
just a table.