Instacart's co-founder gets tactical on crafting company values and intentionally building culture

 Well, max, thank you so much for joining us. I'm excited for this conversation.

 Uh, so I thought an interesting place to start might be to talk about your, your role as a founder, as it relates to culture. Um, and over the course of the company's life, you've worn all sorts of different hats, but one that you have kept coming back to throughout each chapter of the company's life is, is kind of the idea of culture and working on culture.

And so I thought might, might be an interesting place to start to hear your thoughts on maybe why you're drawn to it. And how do you define it?

 Yeah, well working on, on cultures, like something that I've always done at school. When we founded the company, um, I was a generalist and I was doing everything from running product and design to doing our customer support and operational things like running payroll, you know, finding our, our, our offices, making offers to employees, sort of everything.

And, um, even though we didn't have our culture written down yet, I think a lot of the decisions we made early on had a huge effect on culture. So I think from the beginning, culture was a part of my, of my job as a founder and also really passionate about finding the most amazing talent and, and making Instacart a very special place to work.

So designing the experience of our employees, which I think is part of culture is something I've always been in charge of whether that's our annual events or our swag, the way our offices look and feel our internal tools and their design, these things all affect culture and employee experience.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago. And you know, I'm a generalist amongst specialists. And I think this is a common situation that co-founders find themselves in at growing companies. They start with all of these varied responsibilities and sort of all of these Legos. And over time, it makes more and more sense to give away your Legos until you have almost none left and ask yourself, okay, what's my next tour of duty going to be?

And you have to specialize in something. And of course, as a founder, I wanted it to be a really high leverage thing for the company. And So naturally culture was a really great fit for me to focus on full-time

 So you mentioned culture at a, at a high level, but I'd love you to kind of use your own language to define what culture is.

 yeah, I think it's, it's such a great question. what is culture? And culture is.

a word that gets thrown around very often. Few people can define it. Well, and then also I think a lot of the times people have different definitions I believe culture is the consciousness of the company, which includes its beliefs, its behaviors, and the norms of the company.

So culture is who you are and it's sort of based in your values and your purpose. 

 for each one of those. Can you, unpack them a little bit more or give a couple examples?

 right. So, so foundationally, the culture of a company is about what you believe and, and the way you express your beliefs to employees and to the outside world is through cultural artifacts. And, you know, you've heard of these, there are things like your core values, your mission statement, the purpose of the company, the employee value proposition.

And these are artifacts that you build over time. Culture sort of rests on them as a foundation. And then through those artifacts, you can operationalize culture. So you can weave your values into the way you hire people. You can weave your mission into your ambitions as a company, right? And ideally you can turn your mission into the company's, you know, quarterly goals, for example, or it's other ambitions.

Um, and then you can like walk the walk on your culture by rewarding and reinforcing things as they align with the values of the company. So I think, these cultural artifacts are key to defining culture at your company, but then they need to be operationalized through sort of four areas, people ambitions, rewards, and the. 

 starting at the, top level component of, of culture. Um, the first thing you mentioned was beliefs. Can you give us some examples of like what you mean by that? Maybe in the context of Instacart?

 Um, so I think in the early days of a company, the culture is basically the collective values and beliefs of, of the founders and the founding team. And whether you write it down or not, that that is your.

Then over time, you, um, you might need to talk about that culture with prospective employees or, uh, partners. And so you want to write those things down and you end up sort of looking around the room and, um, deciding which of your beliefs are important enough to write down as core values.

And then you end up with a set of core values. So for example, at your company, if you believe, um, speed and doing things fast is more important than perfection and doing things at the highest possible quality, then you might write a value around sense of urgency. And in fact, that Instacart, we have a value called every minute counts, which sort of speaks to the power of using sense of urgency as a tool when needed.

So I think, you know, beliefs translate from personal values of the founders and the founding team into core values that are one of the artifacts of the company. And then, um, they sort of get operationalized day-to-day in the work and the decisions that the team. 

 How do you think about the tension between, the way that the founding team behaves and the personal values of the founding team versus sort of the aspirational nature of what you're trying to do as a company or maybe a different version of yourself that you want to see in the future versus purely just reflecting whoever you are today.

 Yeah, I think that's a really good nuance. There is a big difference between who you are and your stated values, right? There's almost two lists of values. There's the full list of everything you value and how you behave. And then there's the shorter list of things that you want to articulate. And that shorter list may sometimes include things that you aspire to be, or, um, things you think the companies should value over the next four to five years.

That will actually put it in a better position. And the later stage you are, and the larger you are as a company, the more it makes sense to have more of those values be aspirational because you're really trying to guide the next 100 employees let's say, and how they act as opposed to change the way the existing 50 or a hundred employees of the company are today.

 So, if you go back to, you know, the first 10 people that you hired at Instacart and you were running those recruiting processes, I assume a lot of the time you passed on candidates, um, because of what could be defined as culture fit or something cultural outside of, um, competency in the role. What, what did that look like?

 well, I don't love the idea of cultural fit. I think it's too broad and sometimes it's a catch all bucket for people to reject a candidate for reasons they can't explain. I think that in the early days of Instacart, we really looked at each person as an individual and try to imagine what it would be like to work with them.

And in fact, one of our, um, Ongoing hiring practices is to give people, take home challenges and to ask them to do a little bit of work, uh, against a problem that we're actually facing or that we've faced in the past, and then come in and present the way they would solve that problem. And that gives us a lot of idea of how they work and how they think and how they communicate.

And it's very, very hard in a, in a short interview process to really assess what it's going to be like to work with someone. But if you give them plenty of time to solve a problem and show their work, it can be a very useful way of kind of assessing again, how their personal style of working overlaps with the style of the company, um, that you've built. so we did a lot of take on challenges and that was key to assessing folks. And then we also did a lot of trials, right? We would bring people. For two weeks or a month and say, Hey, let's work together. Um, and, and, uh, and if you like it and we like it, then we'll, then we'll continue.

And if it doesn't work out, we'll part ways. 

 So for the folks in the early days that let's say you had the opportunity to trial and you decided not to hire them. And because we're talking about culture, let's assume that they were competent in whatever the role is. What, what did it look like to work with someone who didn't align with the culture or didn't behave in the way that you as a team wanted to behave?

 one of the things that was special about us in the very early days. We were really focused on a few number of things. And at any given time, the whole company, all let's say 10 of us, might've been only working on one key thing perhaps each week that was going to launch by a certain time and believe it or not, you know, we would hire people and we would say, Hey, your one job is to help us launch this one thing successfully.

And we would look up a few days later or a week later, and they would have been off working on something else. we were really looking for people in those early days who could focus and help the company do a very small number of, of big ambitious things.

And if people really didn't like working on just one thing at a time, that would be a common reason why it just wouldn't. 

There's a bunch of different places to kind of jump off from, And I think one that you sort of mentioned in passing that might be interesting to dig into is, um, actually the process of codifying your values. And I think kind of the way that you defined it, max at the beginning, The values are really in many ways, the values or behaviors of the founding team, 

In the sense that, you know, if max is highly analytical, it's most likely that in the first year, the company is going to have an analytical bent to the way in which work is done. Um, and then you get to this point where it's maybe 10 people, 20 people, 25 people, I'm curious to sort of get a sense of, of, what you think, where you then kind of take these implicit, um, behaviors or beliefs.

And you put them into words in, in, in some form. And I know that you've done that multiple times throughout the company's life, but I'd be curious, given the work that you've done, you know, of a founder of a 20 person company reached out and said, Hey, max, I think we're at that time where we want to codify our values as one of the artifacts that you were just talking about, can you kind of share the how behind it or what, what you would do to kind of teach that person how to do it?

 Yeah, I think that at 20 people is a great time to really codify your culture. And the two things that I would suggest that founders do at that stage is one as a founding team, sit down, have a little bit of an offsite and discuss really what you think has made the company successful so far and share each other's personal values in there and, and each other's opinion about what makes the company special and what makes the employees of the company succeed.

And kind of, um, shortlist those values. So now as a, as a founding team, you have this short list of things that you value. Don't try to wordsmith it?

Don't try to prioritize it, but just make a, make a short list of things you value. Then look around the room at the 20 people that work at the company. And one by one kind of say, what makes this person special?

What makes that person's work exceptional? And you start to draw out special qualities of people beyond just the founding team, but the first 1520 employees. And sometimes you find that, you know, that that engineer that really, um, always over delivers and has an extreme amount of ownership is actually the prototype for what you want to see in your next 20 engineers.

And so you may be right, a value around ownership, thinking about that person in the back of your mind and. Ultimately sort of articulate from a top down perspective, what the founding team values, and then from a bottoms-up perspective, you, you sort of solicit feedback. You ask the team to weigh in, um, on the draft set of values, as well as to suggest, um, their, their ideas on what, you know, the company should value.

I think that step is one that people always miss, they think, Okay.

values are something that the founder should own But I think having a bottoms up part of the process is really, really important so that people feel bought in to the end result.

So from there you have this short list of values and then, and then you can, um, sort of remix and combined values to make the list shorter and clearer. And then you can take things out that you think maybe are table stakes, right? That don't need to be articulated, but that are things that you value, but that you don't necessarily need to write into your core values. 

 And then how do you think about taking, uh, the, the behaviors and actually coming up with what, what actual language is useful when talking about values?

 writing the actual language of values is a little bit of an art. And you're looking to say a lot in few words. So sometimes that can mean using a colloquialism or a sort of meme or a phrase, something that means a lot, but, um, does it in a few words, a lot of times companies first set of values comes out of Some of their traditions.

So for example, Twilio, they have a value called draw the owl, which is a reference back to the internet meme where they're sort of a person trying to draw a picture and they show them drawing a couple of circles and then they show them drawing a full, beautiful owl. And the message of, of that value is, Hey, at Twilio, we just, we figure things out when we face hard problems.

So draw the owl. Um, so I think tying the words of the value back to, um, a meme is, is sometimes a good way of saying a lot in a few words. And then I think you kind of want the values to feel really authentic. You want the words you're using not to feel like company jargon, but to just feel like the kinds of things you'd say in a meeting when you're trying to make a point.

And so you can kind of listen, um, for the kinds of things that people say already in your company and, and draw out from that sometimes phrases that, um, that you can use. So for instance, At Instacart, we have a value called every minute counts. And that is really something we would actually say in a meeting, we would say, Hey, should we do the two week version of this project?

Or should we do the two day version of this project? Right. Well, we believe every minute counts. And so we want to actually ship that faster and do the smaller scope. 

 What were the other values in the early days of Instacart?

 We originally had a set of eight values and they were honestly pretty hard for employees to remember. I would go around the office, asking people to tell me what the values of the company or from memory. And most people couldn't do it. And so we found that eight was too many values and then they also weren't really uniquely Instacart?

 Clever ways that made them memorable. One of the values was literally sense of urgency. And so when we refreshed the values, we took sense of urgency and we changed it to say every minute counts, because that really spoke to the way we thought about time as a resource, as opposed to just stating that speed was important. 

 do you remember some of the others and maybe the before and after?

 So one of our values in the very first set of values was called customer focus. Now, obviously that refers to the end consumer and making sure that they're a really important part of everything that we do, but we are really complicated business. We have a four-sided marketplace yet.

 We have customers, we have shoppers if retailers, we have advertisers. And so it isn't just enough to focus on the customer. You have to focus on the customer and also balance the needs of all the stakeholders in our marketplace. And so we wrote a value in the, in the refresh of our values, which is called solve for the customer.

Now, the idea is very similar. We want to make sure the customer's experience is great and that we delight the customer at every. But the way to do that is to solve the complicated equation of all of the other stakeholders so that the customer's experience is made better. And it, um, it also allows teams that aren't directly working on work that touches our customer to actually relate their work back to the end customer.

Right. You might be working on a project for a retailer. That's really important to that retailer. And we want to help the retailer make decisions in a way that ultimately solves for the customer together because ultimately we both want the customer's experience to be better. how did you know that, that it needed to be rewritten or there was a, there were kind of implementation details,

I think part of working on culture is, is talking to people about culture all the time. And one of the ways that I do that is in our new hire orientation, I present the company values and some of the history of the country. And I, and I listened to the kinds of questions that people ask, right. And it's evident often when things are unclear to new hires.

And so I sort of make a note of that. And then I spend time talking to employees and asking them are the core values clear and useful to you and your team. And I try to listen for examples of how the values are actually used and operationalized on a daily basis.

And you can often find people that don't understand the values or that are using them in the wrong way. And that's a sign that they need to be clarified. 

 Um, so switching over, we spent a little bit of time talking about the early days of trying to codify values and what makes for good core values in terms of that artifact. Um, let's spend a little bit more time talking about some of the artifacts that you outlined just a few minutes ago. You talked about mission statement.

You talk about employee value proposition. You talk about brand purpose. Um, and so I'd be curious to go one by one and talk a little bit about like, what, what maybe bad, good and great looks like in each one of those, Cause I think, um, for a lot of folks it's easy to kind of confuse all these things.

Um, and so curious kind of what you mean by each one.

 so we can start with core values. Um, these are really what we stand for as a company and what we expect of each other. And so I think core values really need to be clear and. If it doesn't feel like something that you could use in a, in a sentence and a phrase and use on a daily basis than it's, it's probably a value that's really not going to see much action and then therefore not be as memorable or as useful to the team.

The, the, the mission statement is really the reason the company exists and the change that it wants to see in the world. Oftentimes the change he wants to see in the lives of its customers, right? So Instacart's mission statement is to create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together.

 and so I think it's very important that a mission statement be authentic to what you actually do.

 And that it'd be motivational, right? If you tell someone the mission statement in the process of recruiting them, they should be more likely to want to work for the company. And it's really important also to note that neither core values nor the mission statement are a tagline or a marketing message, right?

These are really authentic statements and every word of them really matters and should ring true to employees inside the company. On the other hand, employee value proposition, it may be okay for that to be a little bit more of a marketing statement, right? That's something you're going to share externally.

And that's going to explain what uniquely motivates people to work at your company and what you can really offer perspective employees. And then you have the brand purpose. This is really like the emotional impact that the company wants to have in the lives of its customers.

Um, that's important because a lot of times, especially with the consumer company, people want to work at the company because they want to make a difference in people's lives. And so being really clear about how the brand fits into people's lives is important.

 Um, so we talked a little bit about defining culture in terms of core values, mission statement, employee value proposition, and brand purpose. The next area, it would be great to spend time is, is how you actually live them and operationalize them. And you've mentioned this a little bit throughout our conversation, but I'd say that the number one thing that happens in a vast majority of startups is at some point when they're 15 people or 20 people, they get together and they write out values and a decent percentage of the time to your point, they probably don't do a good job of that.

But even if they do a good job of coming up with three values, that authentically represent the way in which they behave, nothing is ever done with them, it doesn't actually guide behavior. It doesn't enable this sort of shared consciousness. And so it would be great to talk about how you actually live them and what are the tricky parts about operationalizing them.

Maybe we could focus on kind of going from 10, 15 people to kind of the first 100 or 200 people that kind of scale of company.

 so I think the first thing to say is that when you announce or launch a set of values, it's actually quite a big deal. You want to make this a special moment where people remember the values and it galvanizes the team. And you want to have a lot of buy-in in that moment so that you can kind of create folklore around the values because ultimately day-to-day, every employee is going to decide whether the values are clear and useful to them.

And then they're either going to use them. So I think planning the unveil of values is really important at a small scale. That might be an offsite where you take the team together and really make it a special moment where you unveil the official set of values at a larger scale. And at Instacart, we've done it at all hands meetings, but we've also coupled the unveiling of, of values and other cultural artifacts with things like, um, events or swag, or we will redecorate the office with the value written on the walls of every floor, but cover them up until after the all-hands meetings.

So people leave the all hands meeting and then to their surprise, the, the hallway says the new mission statement of the company, for example, on it. And there's all kinds of little things you can do to keep the values and the mission statement top of mind every day. One of those things is you can create a recognition program that allows employees to recognize each other against the values.

Right? So we have a, a program where any employee can send a thank you note to another employee site, one of the values as like a hashtag and everyone can see each other's recognitions and they also end up in slack so that you can go back through them and, and look at them. And then what's even even more cool here.

Is that on your profile, on your profile in our employee directory, it shows all the recognitions you've ever received and all the recognitions you've ever sent. And so people can, can get an idea of what you've worked on in the past. And what's been exceptional about that. the other cool thing about that is you get metrics from it. So you can see how often each value is being used in recognitions. And what we've seen is that our most popularly referenced value is actually 10 times more popular than the, than the least popular value.

So you start to get an idea of how the values are used, how often they're used in what context they're used and which ones are sort of working in which ones aren't 

Another way we keep values top of mind is we put them on the interview scorecard, so that they're on the interviewer's mind when they're talking to candidates. And they're easy to reference when writing up notes in general. I think a great way for leaders to remind people about the values is that when the company makes a really big decision, especially if that decision is controversial to cite the value that they used to clarify their thinking.

 You spend just a minute, uh, talking about, um, how values are incorporated into the, the interview loop in the interview. Scorecard, can you talk a little bit, a little bit more about that? Because I think when people talk about, uh, culture interviewsIt's it's often not done very well, and it's very sort of abstract.

And so now that you're hiring at extraordinary scale, um, can you talk a little bit about how you leverage values in the actual interview and maybe some examples of, of what that actually looks like?

 one of the best things about values is that everybody who works at the company knows about them and knows what they mean. So they're a very easy shorthand for talking about a working style. And so if you interview somebody and you determine that they would be an amazing fit for the company, based on their ability to live one of the values, let's say we interview someone and they demonstrate extremely high ownership, right?

In a, in a scenario that we present. And I would say, Hey, I really would like?

to hire this person. I think that they will really. Lean into the value. This is your baby, which is our value about personal ownership. And when somebody reads that in my notes, they'll know exactly what I mean instead of me having to describe the whole scenario and why I think the person wants a lot of ownership and will, and will accept and steward that ownership.

I can just say, this person will live our value. This is your baby. in the case of this, specific way that you think about ownership at Instacart, what are you doing in an interview? That gives you the signal or belief that this person does exemplify this value.

I think more than anything that values are a reminder to include questions around the things that the company cares most about. So if your company has a, has a value about ownership, you know, it probably is a good idea for one section of that interview process to include the, an assessment of ownership.when you, think back to interviews that you've done over the last couple of years, and you've left having a lot of conviction that this person exemplifies a given value and they've joined the company and they've really spiked in that way.

 What are the things that you saw in that relatively small amount of time together around the interview process?

 I think for each value, there are some great questions that we've developed that help us understand whether the person really can live that value. For example, one of our values is solve for the customer. And so I might ask somebody who's going to be working in a customer facing area of the business, like product management.

I might ask them, well, you've used our product. W what do you think of it? What are some ways we could improve the product for our customers? What are some opinions you have about the product? And I'm really looking for them to a, have some opinion about what, uh, what they think and how they would improve the product for our customers.

But also I'm looking for the subtle distinction between whether they understand that they are not the only customer and whether they are able to empathize with a broad group of other customers. So, a great answer to that question for me would be, well, I use the product in this way, and I have these thoughts.

Then I talked to some of my friends and my roommate, and they use the product in that way. And so I think you could add this feature for them. And then I talked to my parents who use the product in another way, and the idea that someone. Look at multiple perspectives in an attempt to solve for the customer.

That's a pretty strong answer to that particular question around that value. 

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Max Mullen has worn many hats as a co-founder of Instacart, but he’s been uniquely focused on culture. He shares advice for crafting unique values, tips for making sure they guide day-to-day behavior, and pointers for sidestepping common mistakes.

Instacart's co-founder on crafting company values and intentionally building culture

Max Mullen shares advice for crafting unique values, tips for making sure they guide day-to-day behavior, and how to avoid common mistakes.