Eric Yuan was not satisfied with Cisco Systems, despite the incontrovertible fact that he made a salary in six numbers, working as a vp of engineering at the Cisco Webex video conference software.
“I didn’t even want to go to the office to work,” said Yuan CNBC Make It in 2019.
Yuan was dissatisfied with culture in Cisco, where latest ideas were often closed and the change was slow. When he suggested to construct a brand new, friendly mobile video platform from scratch, the idea was rejected by Cisco leadership. Frustrated with resistance to innovation, Yuan left the company in 2011 and founded a zoom, whose value increased astronomically in pandemic years in air-con, since it became an application for distant work.
One might think that the founders, who, like Yuan, expressed the misfortune with the culture of previous employers, founded latest firms with very different values. However, we found that on average, whether or not they want or founders will probably recreate the culture of their previous employer of their latest undertaking.
The founders come from the place
Yuan’s story comprises an concept that many individuals have a couple of heavy technological giant in comparison with an agile startup. However, our studies have shown that this distinction is not so clear.
Over 50 percent of the founders of American technological startups have previous experience in other firms, often in giants such as Google or Meta. The work of the work of these huge organizations is not all the time really easy to walk when entrepreneurs arrange their very own firms.
IN Our researchWe identified 30 different cultural elements of firms. These include the culture of balance between skilled and personal life, teamwork, authority, innovation and culture -oriented culture in comparison with the customer -oriented culture.
Previous studies have shown that the founders of startups transfer knowledge and technology from old jobs. We found empirical evidence that additionally they transfer work culture.
Comparison of the organizational cultures of “parents”, “Spawnów” and “twins”
In our research, we identified the founders of the startups and used their LinkedIn profiles to seek out firms wherein they worked earlier. Our team used natural language processing, namely Modeling the topic of the task of the latentTo send a SMS to Glassdoor, a site that permits current and former employees anonymously browse firms. We used processed reviews to characterize the culture of “home” firms and startup firms or “spawn”. We also identified the match or “twin” for a welding organization, which had an analogous size, product and number of years of activity.
Then we compared the culture of every startup with the culture of its parent organization and the culture of the “twin” of every spawn to the culture of the same parent in a given 12 months. If the spawn was more just like his parent than the twin to the parent, it confirmed our hypothesis that the founders often transfer their previous work cultures to latest projects.
We found that there are three conditions that favor such transfer.
First of all, the longer the founders were in the organization, the more likely it is that they’ll take their culture to a brand new startup, because they got acquainted with this culture.
The second condition is the compatibility of culture, i.e. the degree to which culture consists of elements which might be consistent of their meanings, and due to this fact have internal compatibility.
For example, in our data there is a platform for location services in the cloud, which has high compliance in its culture. The company has three highly essential cultural elements: it is adaptive, customer -oriented and demanding. These elements consistently indicate the culture of customer response. Our data also includes an e-commerce clothing platform with two cultural elements-growth and balance between skilled and personal life-who are poorly even of their meanings, reducing the compliance of its culture.
We have found that the more conditionally the matching culture of the parent organization – and due to this fact it is easier to know and learn it – the more likely it is that the founders will transfer their elements to latest firms.
Thirdly, the more odd the organization is – the more it stands out from others in its field – the more likely it is that its culture shall be moved to the startup.
In an unusual culture, it is easy to discover cultural elements and remember and switch on them after finding a startup. Because unusual culture attracts a stronger border that distinguishes the organization from others, employees grow to be more aware that the organization has chosen them and that they decided to work in it. This creates cognitive attachment in employees towards the organization, and likewise increases how well its culture learn.
In our study, the cultural unusuality of each startup was measured by calculating cultural distances between all organizations inside the same product category for a given 12 months.
Founders often describe their culture as a characteristic or one of a form. However, we found that this is not necessarily the case. The founders are likely to repeat the culture of their previous employers because they’re used to this manner of working.
False perception?
Many students tell me that they attract more creative and innovative work environments – something that they often associate with startups, not traditional, recognized firms.
But our research suggests that this perception may not be completely accurate.
Job seekers searching for unique or pondering cultures may be surprised when it was found that startup environments resemble the environments of larger technology firms more often than expected.
And for the founders-especially those that left the previous roles because of frustrating cultures in the workplace-it will be awakening to understand how easy it is unintentional to revive the environments themselves that they may avoid.
