Operating Cadence & Cultural Norms

Founders often struggle with asking for high output from people, while keeping them motivated.

Yet, employee happiness typically stems from high levels of productivity, engagement, and meaning in work.  Some find working at a startup to be enjoyable, but this enjoyment should be a consequence of performing excellent work, and not an end in itself.

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear observed:

“Employee happiness is not the leading indicator. It’s a trailing indicator that you’ve done a good job in building a meaningful workplace where people are productive. I’ve never seen unhappy employees in a company where people are engaged with their work and producing at a high rate. And I’ve never seen happy employees in a company where employees are not highly engaged and productive. If you want people to be happy, focus on helping people be productive.”

In this post, we will focus on:

1. Tactics to scale company culture and operating cadence
2. How you should spend your time
3. Methods to evaluate your performance

I. Scaling Company Culture & Operating Cadence

What are the hallmarks of a great company culture?  High employee engagement & productivity.  

As founder/CEO, a key component of your job is to keep up the pace of execution as you grow.

Only the CEO can establish the operating rhythm of a company.  Many CEOs often discover that their employees would rather slow down to offer work-life balance, ensure employee satisfaction, and reduce potential turnover.  However, maintaining momentum is crucial as it is the sole consistent advantage that startups hold over established companies.

Rather than merely telling people to ship faster, build systems or touchpoints that encourage speed. Such systems differ across companies, yet they all have a common characteristic: They prioritize the urgency of resolving customer issues. This customer-centric approach is a common trait amongst successful companies, often reflected in their core values. We outline a few examples below.

Examples: Customer Centricity

"Deel Speed" is the company's core operating principle around urgency. It doesn't mean moving recklessly; payroll demands 100% uptime and perfect compliance. It means solving customer problems today, not tomorrow. And critically, it has to be modeled from the top: Alex and Shuo are often the first people responding to customer feedback in Slack.

Centralized Reviews Channel — Every review across G2, Twitter, and official feedback flows into a single Slack channel monitored by a 7-person team. Every piece of critical feedback is either addressed or evaluated in real time, with the right people tagged to fix it immediately.

Weekly Product Slack Reports — All 70 product teams send Alex weekly Slack updates covering what shipped, what's coming, blockers, and OKR progress. He spends ~5 minutes per report and gets a full picture of the product org in an hour. This keeps him close enough to the work to counter slowness that comes with scale.

Customer-Facing Slack Channels — Deel runs 300–400 rotating customer Slack channels, each staffed with a CSM, a 3-person support team for 24/7 coverage, and Alex himself. When a customer raises an issue, the CSM triggers a Zendesk workflow and the right teams are tagged within minutes. Alex is often the first to respond, which models urgency visibly across the org. Since launching this, churn has dropped.

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Friday Fireside Chats — Customers are invited to share pain points live, often screensharing directly with engineers and PMs. This creates higher-fidelity feedback than secondhand summaries and accelerates the whole org's "rate of learning" about customer needs.

The CEO as Forward-Deployed Resource — Every major account has a dedicated internal Slack channel for cross-functional strategizing. The leadership team is available to parachute into high-stakes situations acting as a direct resource rather than staying removed from the front lines.

Proactive QA Like a Customer — Guillermo regularly sets up accounts from scratch, walking through onboarding end-to-end to catch friction, bugs, and confusion points firsthand. He packages this feedback directly for his teams, similar to Tobi Lütke's annual solo Shopify store setup routine.

Quarterly "Undercover Boss" Support Rotations — Guillermo joins the support queue roughly once a quarter, working through real tickets using the same tools as frontline agents. He uses this to diagnose why tickets exist (documentation gaps, product defects, weak observability) and identify high-leverage fixes

II. Where should you spend your time?

In the phases of early growth, spend most of your time on (1) solving the biggest bottlenecks, (2) building a great team and culture, and (3) setting the company’s direction.

Identifying and solving bottlenecks to move fast.

You can implement any principle you want, but it won’t work if you don’t hire people that move fast. The 80% of the 80/20 rule for moving fast is hiring people who move quickly and get stuff done.

‍You must ensure that each team knows where they’re going, they don’t have resource constraints, and that they have the right team in place to execute. Only the CEO/the founders have a full picture of the business, so only you can do this. Your job is to make sure the company is set up to deal with bottlenecks to move fast.

Examples: Bottlenecks

• Brex begins every planning cycle by asking the question: "What is limiting our growth?"
• By definition, the bottleneck is the single point in the system where if you increase its throughput, the output of the system increases as well. Therefore, Brex views "bottlenecks" as the single highest leverage point where a company can put resources
• Brex attempts to "overwhelm" their bottlenecks with resources to unlock growth in the entire system
• This clarity needs to come from the founder. Pedro aligns the team around this concept and focuses leaders on bottlenecks in his regular leadership meetings.
• Most recently, the leadership team has been focused on deepening their understanding of customer segments. Historically, they've sold Brex the same way to three different customer segments. Going forward, they want to take a much more segmented approach to selling to drive growth.

“The bottleneck mentality frees up a lot of anxiety. There's one thing that matters, and it's a little bit essentialist...The bottleneck for Brex right now is segmentation. We can't grow faster because we have a one size fits all approach to how we sell and market our products. That's the bottleneck. We're spending all of our time just talking about segmentation. That's my entire leadership team meeting for the past maybe one or two quarters. Now. It's a very complicated problem, but I think it puts a lot of emphasis on the few things that matter.”

Building the right team.

Hiring is one of your highest leverage activities. This extends beyond leaders into anyone you hire to solve a problem. If you hire the right person for a role, this frees you up to focus elsewhere while also advancing the company. Few things we recommend:

1. Stay involved, particularly in functions that are new and underperforming.

Alex Bouaziz at Deel interviewed every person until 600 people (at that point, he was the bottleneck). He now only interviews in departments he thinks are not doing well where he needs to act as a bar raiser. They let go of the bottom 5% of the company every month to ensure high performance.

Nat Friedman at GitHub divided everything into low-scale and high-scale tasks. Low-scale means thereʼs an existing system or person to solve it, so it shouldn't take up too much of his time. High-scale means there isnʼt a structured solution, so he should spend his time and energy helping the organization hire and solve it.

2. Codify your values early. These become critical to maintaining quality and culture. Tony Xu (DoorDash) says that culture is “80% who you are and 20% who you aspire to be.” To get started, write down an honest reflection of your company’s current values based on people that have been successful. Use these to objectively score hires during interviews to measure IC performance. [Link to Value]

Auditing function/team health.

It becomes harder to have a complete picture of every function as you scale. As the CEO/founder, you’ll need to build mechanisms to pulse check and dive deep into all of the functions in a way that is authentic to you. The mechanics vary, but the best systems share three traits: the right instrumentation, a consistent scorekeeping cadence, and real follow-through when problems surface.

Tony Xu has done this by building a system of “rigorous measurement” at DoorDash that enables him and his team to know where they stand. He reviews these by himself and in business reviews. This helps him figure out where to spend time and with what leaders.

Qasar Younis runs Team Boards each quarter. Pods present to him and the leadership team and are graded from a scale of A to F on whether they hit their output metrics while maintaining good team health (e.g., low regrettable attrition). Action is taken on teams that receive poor scores.

Guillermo Rauche pipes metrics into Slack using a product area metrics channel for ambient org-wide awareness and similar reports for each product team. They also run a Monthly Business Review for deeper reviews. When something looks off, he expects immediate escalation — not waiting for the next scheduled meeting. A great VP of Data makes this possible, especially for PLG or consumer companies. Vercel hired theirs before Series B, building their metrics infrastructure around Snowflake early.

Communicating with your company. Maintaining Approachability.

As a CEO, you’ll need to drive alignment and set the direction and strategy for the company. One of the best strategies for driving alignment is repetition. Repeat the founding story and come up with memorable phrases so the company remembers them. Try to embed these key phrases in everyone’s day-to-day work.

Kevin Systrom believes communicating well is the highest leverage activity for any CEO

"Communication is the highest-leverage thing you can do: both deciding what you're going to communicate, and also communicating it over and over again. When you're small, you can say, 'You know what, team? I've decided we're going after market X,' and everyone's like, 'Alright, great.' When you get big, you can't do that. You need to make sure you're pointed in the right direction because you can't change directions every week. Spending the time to get it right with your senior team is super high leverage. Then you have to figure out how to communicate it clearly. 'Why' is the most important word in your vocabulary. You can't just say, 'We're going after X.' You have to explain why. Then everyone can say, 'I know what we're doing, and I believe in it.' You can tell people to move left, but if they don't believe in left, you're not going to get results." 

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As you scale, you will be further removed from lower levels within the organization. People all over the company think highly of you and will be scared of you. Below are a few tactics that now work for Alex. Come up with ideas that are authentic to you.

• Each week, Alex’s EA sends him a list of new joiners. He sends a “templated” personalized message to every new joiner on Slack. This creates connection and humanizes him to people he doesn’t work with directly.
• Alex sends personal notes to everyone on their “Deelaversy” and asks them what they’d like to see in the product. He gets great product ideas and feedback from these notes. Again, it humanizes him with people he doesn’t usually work with.

III. Assessing Your Performance

You know you’ve done a good job if (1) you’ve hired a great team, (2) teams are hitting their goals, and (3) employees are motivated and happy. We outline some tactics to assess yourself below.

Regularly audit how you spend your time

Working long hours doesn't automatically mean making progress. Two founders with similar approaches to staying honest about whether they are spending time on the right things.

Tony Xu (DoorDash)  does a weekly review every Sunday — looking back at how he spent the last week and setting 3–4 priorities for the week ahead. He also maintains a longer-horizon list for projects and ideas that don't fit the weekly cadence. The hour functions as an important accountability check: it forces him to assess whether he's actually making progress, not just staying busy.

One thing Tony emphasizes: everything compounds. Fifteen minutes a day on customer support becomes months over a year. Two hours a week meeting executives becomes months over a year. The weekly review is how he stays intentional about where that time goes.

Vlad Tenev (Robinhood) reviews his week every Friday and plans the next, anchored by the question: what would make next week a good week? When possible, he journals daily as a lighter version of the same practice — a quick check on what got done and what needs to happen tomorrow. This connects his personal time management to company priorities and keeps him close to execution.

Keep a list of permanent KPIs to assess yourself.

• Rank yourself against other CEOs you know on a 0–10 scale.
• List the drivers behind your ranking (e.g., youʼve hired an A+ team of executives, moving fast)
• Once a quarter, evaluate yourself on each of those drivers: “If I were to rate everyone on my team 1–5, do I score at least a 4.5 on average. If not, what am I doing about that?”
• If you are constantly too busy, something is wrong. The key is building a great team around you

“If youʼre always busy, you are not successful, because you havenʼt set up the right framework for the company. Your job is to design a system that can operate with minimal involvement.” — David Rusenko, Weebly

Get an executive coach.

Coaching approaches vary widely. Some founders work with the same coach for years; others rotate every couple of years as their needs shift from founder conflicts to people management to enterprise sales. A rare few skip formal coaching altogether (early Stripe leaned on Claire, their COO, as a de facto coach on people issues).

Most CEOs prefer coaches who are or have been CEOs themselves. A few examples below.

Khalid Halim — Worked with Checkr and several YC founders. Focused on communications and conflict resolution. (First Round piece here)

Jeff Weiner (former LinkedIn CEO) — Pedro from Brex worked with him after Matt Mochary, specifically seeking counsel on deep CEO scaling challenges.

Jim Kochalka — Popular with NYC founders for founder conflicts, team leadership, and founder psychology. Not the right fit if you're looking to solve EPD org issues. Expensive, but founders who work with him tend to like him a lot.

Bill McDermott — Henrique from Brex worked with him to sharpen his enterprise sales approach and get counsel on building GTM. Met roughly once a month, with sessions focused exclusively on enterprise sales.

Tim Porthouse — Peter Reinhardt's coach for the ~6–8 years. Former COO and co-founder of an IT services company with a deep understanding of startup leadership. Uses a Socratic method drawing out your own thinking to solve your own problems. Having a long-term coach can help.

Matt Mochary – Coach of many Silicon Valley founders. All his resources and curriculum are here.

‍Evaluate yourself with feedback from reports and board members.‍

The best mechanism is a formal 360. We recommend sharing your 360 with your team, board, and in some cases the company. This establishes a culture of accountability and self-improvement, led from the very top. Examples of how other CEOs have done this can be seen in the case studies section

IV. Other Examples

Tactics to stay close to customers

Every week, Nat Friedman has a two-hour video call with open-source maintainers, and goes to five enterprise customer meetings.

Emmett Shear talked to customers in batches. He shared what the company is up to, asked what theyʼd like Twitch to do, and asked what products theyʼre using in other facets of their lives.

Peter Reinhardt spent 10–20% of time every week in customer calls or meetings.

Tony Xu still regularly completes deliveries to stay close to customers (e.g., Dashers, Restaurants, Users)

Aadit Palicha and KV Vohra (co-founders) still regularly pack orders, spend time in warehouses/stores, and complete deliveries

Tactics to assess and communicate your performance

David Rusenko shares his results with his reports to let them know what he’s working on. It also helps leaders understand why he makes changes when he implements something new.

Marco Zappacosta shares his 360 action items with the whole company.

Emmett Shear asked his reports twice a year how heʼs doing and what he could be doing better

Pedro and Henrique shared feedback the board gave them to the entire company driving accountability

Tactics to move fast

At Athelas, Tanay Tandon has built a differentiated process to drive urgency, setting aggressive deadlines that help improve shipping speeds:

“We have a really strong demo culture in the company. People sprint to get their thing shipped by Friday so that they can present it at the 4pm all-hands. We also have demo days which are more high production quality, every three weeks or so. Product features are built in sprints to get stuff out to show at all-hands or demo days. Both of these act as forcing functions to ship quickly.”

Taking it a step further, Tanay is obsessive in reviewing customer feedback every weekend. Tanay analyzes Gong and SDR calls himself on Saturdays to gain firsthand insight.  Watching sales call recordings offers insight into which sales reps are performing the best, which pitches worked and which didn’t, and mitigates any issues in meeting sales quotas early.

Tanay also answers customer support questions, peruses customer emails, and formulates lists of prevailing customer concerns. On Sunday afternoons, he convenes with his co-founders and key leaders to detail a new product or feature that fixes any significant customer issues he has noted.  He may also designate engineers to implement the product/feature solution outlined, and launch the fix in 1-2 weeks. Tanay frequently opts to collaborate with the same engineers who have demonstrated the capacity to complete their regular tasks in addition to the new product responsibilities.

“This is an extra forcing function on the people that I know are really good to solve a specific problem that one of our customers is struggling with. The point is to show the entire team that you can always up the pace.

Because the team works directly with me, it also has the positive effect of showing everyone how ingrained I am in the product and how much time I spend talking to customers. It’s critical for people to know that the CEO knows every screen in the product and understands the customer deeply. But more than anything, it shows people that things can be done very quickly, if you do a good job spec’ing them, do a good job scoping them in weekly chunks, and talk actively with customers.

It also gives me and the managers the confidence to call bullshit when people are like, 'We can't do this in a week or two.’ When we shipped a particularly ambitious project, people were like, holy shit, this was done in two weeks? They couldn't believe it and it upped the pace of everything in other pods.”

Tanay also creates opportunities to showcase teams that have met aggressive deadlines internally.

"People are motivated by the opportunity to showcase their work to other employees. If you set aggressive deadlines around these showcases [4pm all hands], you generate more productivity and excitement in the whole company. It also has the positive effect of turning engineers who demo a lot into mini-celebrities. Creating a platform for your most productive people to become famous within the company is very impactful.”

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Amazon maintains high velocity operating cadence even at its current scale by organizing its engineering and product teams into decentralized small teams. How does this work?

• Small, decentralized teams drive product development for Amazon. Amazon employees are organized into small self-contained teams focused on a single product or problem. These teams typically have 6-8 people and are called “two-pizza teams” because you can feed them with just 2 pizzas. The teams have all disciplines they need to execute (e.g., product, engineering, QA, etc).‍
• Single-threaded owners run each team. These people have full responsibility for decisions and for outcomes. It is the responsibility of the single-threaded owner to get support from other centralized functions that are not broken down into small teams. Functions like Sales, Finance, and Marketing are often centralized and resources are shared across small teams. The single-threaded owner is responsible for writing performance reviews for all employees on their team
  
  • Leaders don’t have to be engineers, but leaders need to be curious and willing to learn
  • Non-technical leaders usually are supported by an engineering manager/leader

• Amazon optimizes for speed over efficiency: Teams are expected to work as quickly as possible to reach their goal. They are allowed to build or borrow anything they need to get the job done. If they end up rebuilding something or duplicating the work of another team, the assumption is there is a good reason for doing this.
  
  • While Amazon optimizes for speed, they have built review systems to enable consistency. Within Amazon, there is a respected group of IC engineers called “principal engineers.” Outside of their normal work, they also organize for “PE reviews” to provide feedback to teams outside of their own 
  • When a small “two-pizza team” wants to make an important architectural decision, they are expected to talk to a principal engineer. Amazon prefers loose coordination over multi-step approval processes that can drag timelines  ‍
• Amazon builds using a service-driven architecture: Amazon breaks every external and internal product into a service that can be built and supported by a small team. When they want to build a new product, they “spin up a new service.” Teams are expected to maintain anything that they build, and internal services are held to the same standards as external services.‍
• Teams always work backwards from the customer: For new launches, teams must write a press release and a user FAQ before they start writing code. This ensures that users are at the forefront of every decision the team makes.
• We include a link to the book “Working Backwards” if you want to learn more about Amazon
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Twilio, like Amazon, believes the key to maintaining speed is to recreate early startup conditions through customer-centric small teams. Employees are more motivated to do great work when they have a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose versus working purely for compensation. How does Twilio do this?

• Think in terms of ownership, and not tasks. Design the small teams with the purpose of owning a particular problem or component of the product. Twilio defines four attributes for each team:‍
  
  • Customer: Who is the customer your serving (e.g., external developers, internal tools, etc)‍
  • Mission: What is the mission of the team? What is the problem the team is solving?‍
  • Metrics: What is the key success metric? (I.e., How will you know if the team is successful)‍
  • Code Base: Code base ownership (ideally, the team owns the problem and the code)
• Team’s are self-contained groups of 7-10 people and have a single-threaded owner (like Amazon)
  
  • Each team includes everyone they need to solve the customer problem. In the case of Twilio, this mean engineers, designers, product managers, and a single-threaded owner

• Each team has a single-threaded owner responsible for the success of the mission. This person could be a product leader, an engineering leader, or even a business leader in a different function. Successful single-threaded owners have the following characteristics:
  
  • Entrepreneurial drive
  • Nuanced understanding of the customer
  • The ability to see the big picture and how the dots connect to your business plan

• Having a single-threaded owner creates opportunities for local decision making, and it also helps you identify a future bench of leaders for the company

• Owners can report to other owners. At the time, Twilio’s R&D team was made up of 800-900 small teams with 900 total owners. This enables you to get a lot more done as you empower a bench of leaders in the company.

• This doesn’t work for all teams. Some teams are better off being functionally organized. Sales is a good example as you don’t want a small sales team for every EPD small team. Sales usually stays largely functional with product-specific sales teams that are created over time. At Twilio, there is a generalist sales team with sub-teams for specific products

Below is a specific example of how this worked at Twilio.
Twilio’s first product was voice. The team quickly scaled to 20 people. At that point, they divided it into two self-contained teams of 10 people. One team was focused on building a set of APIs for customers to use and another team was focused on building connectivity to global carriers.

This enabled two clean code bases, two customers, two missions, and two sets of metrics. The API team built new APIs for customers, and the connectivity team connected to every carrier in the world so users could make calls in a low-cost, high-quality way.
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avra Batch #1

When RunwayML was about 30-40 people, they organized into Ensembles. 

• Ensembles are small, fully functioning teams with everything they need to reach a goal
• For example: a designer, a full-stack engineer, two researchers, and a video editor
• There is no fixed structure. Main idea is they have everything they need to work
• Each team is given a mandate (i.e., their mission) that they must achieve as a team
  
  • For example: Make Model B perform X by Y date
• These teams are flexible. If they are not performing, they can reassemble and move to other pods
• New ensembles are created regularly (e.g., every one or two months, sometimes faster)
• This was done to enable better communication and coordination as the team grew over time

Recently, they adjusted the approach because they have more major initiatives across the company. Now teams are organized into small groups of 6-7 people. Each team has a defined mini roadmap and broader scope and structure versus what they did with Ensembles. Outside of this change, the principles are the same. In other words, teams are self-contained and small, which enables fast and coordinated work.