Yu-kai Chou

Culture Management is essential for growth stage companies

Our company has been through many cycles and products throughout the years, but it’s the passion and bond between teammates that have always carried on with us. That will continue to carry on no matter what size we grow to. We are a team, and we are a family.

This places an enormous emphasis on having the right Culture. Culture is something intangible but very impactful. It affects team morale, productivity, conflict resolution, decision-making, and hiring — basically everything that moves the company forward in the right direction. It is something that needs to be nurtured and maintained, as it could easily be diluted as the company grows.

Therefore, I spent a lot of time researching about companies that boast their cultures as a competitive edge, including Apple, Zappos, Netflix, Yammer and more (yes, I’m not pretending I came up with all this stuff. The giants get the credit and I get the shoulders). I also made a list on what most of my friends love about their jobs, and what they hate about their jobs to figure out how can we create a system that automatically generates the former and eliminates the latter.

It seemed striking to me that, everyone complains about their managers, but when these complainers become managers themselves, nothing has changed, as people below them still complain about their managers. Clearly the “bad manager” syndrome is not based on an individual’s capability, but an overall system flaw.

Culture is the system that either creates the right environment where everyone can easily be good managers, or where bad managers are kicked out, so good people do not lose motivation.

The RewardMe DNA

There’s a certain DNA within the RewardMe Team Members that keeps us all bonded together. We call it a DNA because it isn’t just rules that look nice, but it should be something that is ingrained deep inside every member, which is reflected upon daily conduct.

These are not just fancy statements we put on walls and badges, but all team member are evaluated (and rewarded) based on how well they have this ingrained into them. Hiring and firing should not only be based on performance output, but also environment output.

1) Put positive energy into the company

Bad attitude in the company is UNACCEPTABLE. Your responsibility in the company is not only to perform, but to make everyone around you better in every way you can. Don’t be the “Game over man!” guy you see in movies. Be that person who is always thinking positively and encouraging others. Always inspire hope and ideas to new solutions.

2) In whatever you do, be exceptional and over-impressive

Our competitors are filled with good people. That’s why we all need to be excellent. We believe the best people are 10x compared to the average, and we should always strive to be that 10x. You need to care intensively about outperforming expectations and getting more wins together as a team.

You need to maintain calm poise in stressful situations and be a strong pillar, especially when it takes many pillars to hold up a roof. We don’t care about being over-impressed with your hours. We want you to create WOW moments for the rest of the team. Do whatever it takes to achieve that.

3) Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

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2011: The Year of Foundation for RewardMe

2011 finally ended. It went by faster and slower than I expected. Slower because so many things happened in this year and we got so much done, and faster because it felt like an instant and there were still so much more that we wanted to do!

This is an email that shares a bit on the journey we took, what led us to where we are today, and why we are doing what we are doing. When our company becomes so big that employees no longer recognize the names of everyone in the company, there is something that everyone can trace back to and see what happened among the Founding Members that built the kingdom together through hard work, persistence, faith, and loyalty towards each other.
And this is the story that will be remembered as books and movies are made about us

Now that you are all excited and ready, here is the Life of RewardMe in 2011 (I omit some names for privacy and confidentiality considerations):

January 2011

Having conceptualized the idea RewardMe and pivoted from Viralogy 3 months ago, we finally launched our first QR Code Phone app product. We raised about $50K in the past year and are fighting hard to spread our product everywhere and raise more funding.

February 2011

We were quickly implemented in 50 stores in Mountain View and Palo Alto with our QR Code product. We got relatively few signups and check-ins (looking back) but we were all excited about it and a small base of iPhone/Android users loved us. We made the mistake of scaling up too quickly before making 100% sure there is product/market fit, especially with the merchants. It was also by impressive fate that Adam Gervin, an Entrepreneur with $1B in exits and now our dear teammate, saw RewardMe at the store that was actually classified as a “lost cause” between Jun and Me due to poor check-ins, and liked it enough to approach us about working together. Vincent Ng, our sales helper in Vancouver, also decided to invest his own money in the company to push us forward.

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What the **** is our CEO doing???

In the past 6 years of being an entrepreneur, I’ve had many small, private conversations with Startup CEOs, and I noticed a pretty interesting but common trend.  I initially thought this was more of a unique experience of my own and very few people had the same issue, but I started to see the same thing among technical and non-technical CEOs alike. I then realize it’s something that may be worth sharing about.

Often times, when I ask these startup CEOs about their roles in the company, they would sheepishly say, “Yea…so I’m the ‘CEO’ of the company….whatever that really means…” I’ve been in that mentality myself. It’s hard to explain what you do as a startup CEO, as everything seems pretty vague and does not sound like it tangibly makes the business more value. The only clear task that people actually credit their CEOs is “fundraising”.

But these CEOs unanimously say they work crazy hours. So what are they doing anyway with these hours? It’s somewhat of a mystery.

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This is the talk that I did at Stanford University on April 19th, 4:15PM at the NVIDIA Auditorium.

The topic was focused on working on startups for entrepreneurs that came from Asia.

How to be influential within your existing friends

There are many people who are not interested in becoming powerful and impactful in the world, but almost everyone wants to be influential and respected among their friends and peers.

However, the majority of the people do not become that, mostly because they are so comfortable with their existing social statuses in their groups that they don’t know how to make it different.

Here are some guidelines to help you become more influential within your circle. Your circle could mean anything from your small group of friends, your class, your department, or your entire organization.

1. Become the best

This is the most straight forward but most difficult way to become influential. It simply means being the best at whatever your group is doing. In fact, most respectable and influential individuals from a group are the ones that have mastered their skillsets the most, whether it be basketball, sales, programming, or just video games.

The way to do this is simply match talent with hard work and become the best. Nothing fancy. Interestingly enough, a lot of people who become extremely successful later on in life still highly respect their childhood friends who were remarkable in a game they played, even if the friends are not very successful themselves.

One key to note is that the activity you excel at must be shared by all the people in your circle. If you are the best at chess in a chess club, you will be respected as everyone is doing it. But if you are best at sales but your circle does operations and finance, then it wouldn’t have the same effectl. Finally, conduct yourself in a manner that minimizes jealously (elaborated in another post)

2. Become useful

If you don’t have the ability to become the best at what you do (by definition the majority of the people), another way is to become useful. This means that you are always there to help everyone out, and always have the right resources handy when it’s needed.

This is much easier to accomplished because you do not need to be the most talented at something. You just need to be the most prepared and most available out of all. If you are the one that brings something when no one else thought it would come in handy, or you remembered a piece of information that suddenly was needed, people will start to trust you. Eventually, as you are there for everyone and people start to rely on you more and more, you start to gain in respect and influence.

One key to note is that you want to make sure you don’t do it in a manner that suggests people can simply take advantage of you. You want to make sure you maintain a strong core and are only helping because you want to help so don’t feel like people can trample over you. Learn how to say no when you have to.

3. Become audacious

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I’ve had the honor of being invited to be a guest lecturer to talk about Social Media at a Stanford CS course on personal branding. Many of my Twitter friends wanted me to post a video, so here it is

A few things:

1) My friend who taped it couldn’t get the camera to work at the beginning, so this is about 10 minutes into the talk.
2) The camera ran out of batteries, so this video ends 20 minutes before I actually finished (but I think that’s okay because who wants to watch super long videos?)
3) I’m more used to setups where my laptop was in front of me, so for this one I kept on looking at the side, which I somewhat awkward.

Besides that, enjoy!

Chou Notes

Printers suck.

I’ve had some decent successes in my life in a variety of tasks/hobbies/work that I do. I cut out a bunch of it in the video just because it is too long and it sounds braggy (but I needed some credibility for “almost anything”)

The three things that can get you to do something well:

1) Confidence
2) Concentration
3) Condition

Also, for preparation work, you need to

1) Always be self-reflecting
2) Always be strategizing (or optimizing)
3) Always be learning from people who do it better

If you master these things, this can help you SIGNIFICANTLY boost your level at anything you do, from playing games, doing a hobby, personal skills, to even getting girls

I used to suck at almost everything I do until I figured some of this out. Now I’m good at a lot of things (not everything), or at least I quickly get good at the things I’m serious about. It’s not really about being smart, but it’s about mastering a system. The key is “Doing it well” so the way you do it is more important than your intelligence.

Hope this helps and more tips will be awesome in the comment section!

In most people’s minds, the hardest part about being an entrepreneur is starting. That’s actually not true. Starting is the easiest part and it just requires you to get off your butt and start doing things. You only think it’s the hardest part because that’s the part YOU are stuck on.

For that reason, here’s a little guide to help you get over that “but I don’t know how to start!” hurdle, so you will have no excuse not knowing how to start your company.

Days 1-5: Decide to be an Entrepreneur and learn as much as you can about it

This is the day that you finally decide to take that leap of faith and begin a real life. Some people start this day by being laid off, but hopefully you came to this conclusion on your own terms.

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