The 1 thing that predicts everything 🤯 in a company
How do you drill down a company to its core?
The most underrated aspect while evaluating business strategy is company DNA.
Most people confuse company DNA with their tangible strengths —> e.g. Apple is good at design, Meta is good at experimentation etc. But that is just the effect of DNA, not the cause.
In the beginning, founder DNA is company DNA. A founder who is sharp at design and user intuition will by default create a design first organisation. A founder who is extremely scientific and hypothesis + experimentation driven to find user needs will create an org that values rigorous experimentation. A founder who excels at people ops will create a meticulous process-driven org.
This dilutes often as the company grows. Today’s Microsoft would be a more a function of how Satya operates, rather than Bill Gates.1
But the interesting bit is how that defines so many things your company will do.
Intuition vs Data first
E.g. A intuition first founder will take the initial time to chisel the product to match their intuition before launching it. They are also more likely to be design driven, invest in brand building very early on and be sharp about exactly the user they want and leave everyone else. They are also more likely to be patient with data, let it simmer and pivot only when their conviction truly fails.
Conversely, a data first founder will often operate on the lean principles, get a basic version out and leave a lot of design choices to data. This also means they need to be in channels where getting data on products is fast —> more performance marketing over brand marketing. Data is supposed to drive decisions, so the operating model is get to ‘good’ data as fast as possible, then steer accordingly.
Seeing this in India vs US
Most consumer internet companies in India have grown in the latter way. And there are multiple reasons for this:
Most of these companies are started by engineers, with limited exposure (and/or curiosity) to design.
The former is a riskier option and Maslow’s heirarchy also applies in how we start companies —> if you are in a developing country (with capital scarcity), design seems like a luxury, because by the time you get to the real product, you might be out of money. US, as a capital abundant market with the capacity to absorb that capital, has that luxury of time to invest more in design.
Where you are as a country on the tech adoption curve also defines how attuned your design sensibilities are to that tech. As a market matures, design demand and sense both increase.
The intuition vs data lens can be used to drill down a company to its core essence of operating, and then you will often find why everything they do make sense. And if they don’t, the gaps will be obvious for you to say why the strategy is not coherent. E.g. A brand first org will take time to learn performance marketing and how it works, imbibe it in itself and change its velocity, thinking etc, so if that is coming out as the top item in next quarter’s revenues, you know there’s an inconsistency.
I’ve painted the extremes of intuition vs data or right vs left brained, but the truth is it’s a spectrum. And while one factor will be heavier than the other in all companies, there is a balancing act of the other factor as well to create truly great business.
A good modus operandi for a founder then is to hire people on both extremes and design a great system for them to work together, so as to not be blindsided on one end. (This can only happen over time with enough capital and resources and is actually very hard to pull off. Apple has done that well.)
But this also has implications on how you choose a company to work for. If you lean much more heavily on one side of the spectrum, you might be a natural fit at a company which also falls into your side of the spectrum. If you want to make yourself more rounded, you can try out both environments one by one.
That’s why, company DNA might be a much more influencing factor in decision-making than we realise.
With hopefully some vestiges of the original culture