Instacart co-founder Max Mullen gets tactical on crafting company values and intentionally building culture

Brett Berson: Well, Max, thank you so much for joining us. I'm excited for this conversation. 

Max Mullen: Thank you so much for having me Brett. 

Brett Berson: So I thought an interesting place to start might be to talk about your role as a founder, as it relates to. 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 the idea of culture and working on culture might be an interesting place to start to hear your thoughts on maybe why you're drawn to it. And how do you define. 

Max Mullen: Working on cultures, something that I've always done at Instacart. When we founded the company, 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, finding our offices, making offers to employees, everything.

And 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 job as a founder, also really passionate about. Finding the most amazing talent and making Instacart a very special.

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 and function our internal tools and their design, these things all affect culture and employee.

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 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 you 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. 

Brett Berson: You mentioned culture at a high level, but I'd love you to use your own language to define what culture is, is 

Max Mullen: it says a great question.

What is culture? And culture is a word that gets thrown around very often. And 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 based in your values and your purpose. 

Brett Berson: For each one of those, can you unpack them a little bit more or give a couple of examples? 

Max Mullen: So foundationally, the culture of a company is about what you believe and the way you express your beliefs to employees and to the outside world is through cultural artifacts.

There are things like your core values, your mission statement, the purpose of the company, employee value proposition. And these are artifacts you've 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. And ideally you can turn your mission into the company's quarterly goals, for example, or its other ambitions. And then you can walk the walk on your culture by rewarding and reinforcing things. They align with the values of the company. These cultural artifacts are key to defining culture at your company, but then they need to be operationalized through four areas, people ambitions, rewards, and the environment 

Brett Berson: at the top level component of culture.

The first thing you mentioned was beliefs. Can you give us some examples of what you mean by that? Maybe in the context of Instacart. So I think 

Max Mullen: in early days of. The culture is basically the collective values and beliefs of the founders and the founding team. And whether you write it down or not, that is your culture.

Then over time, you might need to talk about that culture with prospective employees or partners. And so you want to write those things down and you end up looking around the room and 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. 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, at Instacart, we have a value called every minute counts, which speaks to the power of using sense of urgency as a tool when needed.

So I think 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 it operationalized day-to-day in the work and the decisions that the team does. How do you think 

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

Max Mullen: I think that's a really good nuance. There is a big difference between who you are and your stated values. 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 things you think the company 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.

Brett Berson: So, if you go back to 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 because of what could be defined as culture fit or something cultural outside of competency in the role. What did that 

Max Mullen: look like? I don't love the idea of cultural fit.

I think it's too broad. And sometimes as a catch, all. Bucket for people to reject a candidate for reasons they can't explain. I think that in the early days of Instagram, 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 ongoing hiring practices is to give people, take home challenges and to ask them to do a little bit of work 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 short interview process to really assess what it's going to be like to work with some. But if you give them plenty of time to solve a problem and show their work, it can be a very useful way of assessing again, how their personal style of working overlaps with the style of the company that you've built.

So we did a lot to take on challenges and that was key to assessing folks. And then we also did a lot of trials. We would bring people in for two weeks or a month and say, Hey, let's work together. And if you like it and we like it, then we'll continue. And if it doesn't work out, we'll. So 

Brett Berson: 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 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? 

Max Mullen: One of the things that was special about us in the very early days is that.

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, 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. We were really looking for people in those early days who could focus and help the company do a very small number 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 work out.

Brett Berson: There's a bunch of different places to jump off from the framing. And I think one that you mentioned in passing that might be interesting to dig into. Is actually the process of codifying your values, the way that you defined it, max, at the beginning, in many ways, the values or behaviors of the founding team in the sense that 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. And then you get to this point where it's maybe 10 people, 20 people, 25 people. I'm curious to get a sense of what you think. Were you then take these implicit behaviors or beliefs and you put them into words in some form.

And I know that you've done that multiple times throughout the company's life, but I'd be curious, given kind of the work that you've done with 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 share the how behind it or what you would do to teach that person how to do it?

Max Mullen: 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 each other's opinion about what makes the company special and what makes the employees of the company successful and shortlist those values.

So now as a founding team, have this short list of things that you thought. Don't try to wordsmith it. Don't try to prioritize it, but just 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, say what makes this person special? What makes that person's work exceptional?

And you sorta draw out special qualities of. Beyond just the founding team, but the first 1520 employees. And sometimes you find that that engineer that really 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 your.

Ultimately articulate from a top-down perspective, what the founding team values. And then from a bottoms-up perspective, you sort of solicit feedback. You ask the team to weigh in on the draft set of values, as well as to suggest their ideas on what 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.

Having a bottoms up part of the process is really, really important so that people feel bought into the end result. So from there you have this short list of values and then you can remix and combine values to make the list shorter and clearer. And then you can take things out that you think maybe are table stakes that don't need to be articulated, but there are things you value, but that you don't necessarily need to write into your core values.

Brett Berson: And then how do you think about taking the behaviors and actually coming up with what actual language is useful when talking about value? 

Max Mullen: 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 meme or a phrase, something that means a lot, but 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, I think Twilio, they have a value called draw that. Which is a reference back to the internet meme, where there's 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 that value is, Hey, at Twilio, we just figure things out when we face hard problems.

So draw the out. Tying the words of the value back to a meme 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 for the kinds of things that people say already in your company and draw out from that sometimes phrases 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? Well, we believe every minute counts. And so we want to actually ship that faster and do the smaller scope. 

Brett Berson: What were the other values in the early days of Instacart? 

Max Mullen: We originally had a set of 8 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 country. 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. They weren't articulated in clever ways that made them memorable. One of the values was literally a 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 wasn't. Do you 

Brett Berson: remember some of the others and maybe the before and after? 

Max Mullen: So one of our values in the very first set of values was called customer focus, obviously that refers to the end consumer and making sure that they're really important part of everything that we do.

But we are really complicated business. We have a four-sided marketplace. We have customers. If shoppers have 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, this. In our marketplace. And so we wrote a value 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 turn. 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. It also allows teams that aren't directly working with.

Work that touches our customer to actually relate their work back to the end customer. 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.

Brett Berson: How did you know that that needed to be rewritten or there were implementation 

Max Mullen: details? I think part of working on culture 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 company.

And I listened to the kinds of questions that people ask and. 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. This is 

Brett Berson: 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.

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 state. You talking about employee value proposition, you talk about brand purpose. And so I'd be curious to go one by one and talk a little bit about what bad. Good and great looks like in each one of those.

Because I think for a lot of folks, it's easy to confuse all these things. And so curious kind of what you mean by each 

Max Mullen: one. So we can start with core values. 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 actionable.

If it doesn't feel like something that you could use in a sentence and afraid. And use on a daily basis than 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 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. 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'd be motivational. If you tell someone the mission statement in the process of recruiting them, they should be more likely to want to work for the. And it's really important also to note that neither core values nor the mission statement are a tagline or a marketing message. These are really authentic.

Statements and every word of them really matters. It 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. 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 and the brand purpose. This is really like the emotional impact that the company wants to have. In the lives of its customers. And 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. 

Brett Berson: 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 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 stores. 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 going from 10, 15, people took the first 100 or 200 people that kind of scale of company. 

Max Mullen: 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 or they're not. So. 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 values and other cultural artifacts. Things like 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 hallway says the new mission statement of the company. For example, on it, 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.

So we have 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. Recognitions. And they also end up in slack so that you can go back through them and look at them and then what's 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. 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 interviews.

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 a minute 

Brett Berson: talking about how values are incorporated into the interview loop in the interview.

Scorecard, can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I think when people talk about culture interviews, it's often not done very well and it's very sort of abstract. And so now that you're hiring at extraordinary scale, Can you talk a little bit about how you leverage values in the actual interview and maybe some examples of what that actually looks.

Max Mullen: 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 in a scenario that we present.

And I would say, Hey, I really would like to hire this person. I think that they will. 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 accept and steward that ownership.

I can just say, this person will live our value. This is the. And 

Brett Berson: the case of the specific way that you think about ownership and Instacart, what are you doing in an interview loop that gives you the signal or belief that this person does exemplify this value? 

Max Mullen: I think more than anything, the values are a reminder to include questions around the things that the company cares most about.

So if your company has a value about ownership, it probably is a good idea for one section of that interview process to include an assessment of own. When you think 

back 

Brett Berson: 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 really spiked in that way.

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

Max Mullen: 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, you've used our product. 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 they think and how they would improve the product for our customers, but also looking for the subtle distinction between whether they. I 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 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 will.

Look at multiple perspectives in an attempt to solve for the customer. That's a pretty strong answer to that particular question around that 

Brett Berson: value. One of the things we started to talk about was the idea of measuring or understanding culture in the different parts of a company's life. I'm curious, what you've learned about 

Max Mullen: measurement measuring culture is really hard and.

I think there's a few obvious ways that you can measure culture. One is you can run an employee engagement survey, and this is kind of answering the question. How do people feel about working for the company? What's their level of company confidence right now, but another question that's a little bit different is.

What is it like to work at the company? What is the employee experience? And that is something you really have to sit down and talk to people about and almost do user research on your own company to figure out. And then I think that there's also this idea of employer brand. And what is your external reputation as an employer?

For example, what's your rating on Glassdoor or what is your. Right. When you send out offers these things are measurements of your employer brand. There's a few different ways to measure culture, but it's really hard. And most of these are lagging indicators of culture. The bigger you get, the harder it is to do this from a centralized position.

When a company gets, let's say over a thousand employees, it's pretty hard for any one person to centrally understand culture and take the pulse. And so what you end up having to do is establish culture carriers. Sometimes that's early employees. People who have a lot of relationships and context, but also sometimes newer employees quickly become culture carriers.

So in leading culture at Instacart, part of my job is to find these culture carriers as quickly as possible, and then to stay in regular contact with them as we work on evolving our culture together and engage 

Brett Berson: those folks informally. Or do you bring them together in some sort of council as the company scales?

Max Mullen: I try to do both. There's a small group of us that have a slack channel and talk about culture on a regular basis. And then there's people that I check in with every so often more informally and ask them how culture is working for them. But I do think the questions you ask people about culture are important.

So the questions that I love to ask people when I'm trying to assess how culture is working for them are the. If a friend asks you what it's like to work here, what would you say? And I'm sort of looking for people to describe in their own words, what the employee experience or culture of the company is.

And what's really interesting about this is that sometimes people say things I'm not expecting. So for example, I started to hear a few years ago from people, this idea that Instacart's a place where we're both passionate and hardworking and also kind and. Respectful of each other and that the juxtaposition between those two things, a lot of passion, but also a lot of kindness and teamwork was a really rare combination.

And I think that that speaks to one of our values actually, which is called go far together. Now that value already existed. But now when I talk about that value go far together, I referenced this juxtaposition and some of the people I spoke to gave me the vocabulary to talk about this value. Another question to ask is, are our values clear and useful?

And give me an example of how you've used them recently. And it's really interesting, which values people choose to talk about. And then what examples they use to talk about how those values were useful to them. And then a third question that I use is if you had a magic wand, what would you change about our culture?

And this is really an open-ended question designed to really get at whatever it is that people think we could be doing better. But I do think it's an important question. By asking this question of many people and then drawing the patterns out of it. You can really quickly assess what's going on in culture.

I'll also say that. I think counterintuitively a great time to ask these questions is about a month after people start at the company. They've gotten to know the company a little bit, but not too much. And they can also still remember most of the things about their last company and what was great about working there.

And I can ask those people, what are some of the things that you think. Previous employer did better than us, or what are some of the things that you would like to bring in from your last company? And we can really get at some of the quick improvements we can make. And this is where I get a lot of little tactical things and heads up from people about what's worked well for them in the.

So one 

Brett Berson: of the interesting things that's happened in, in the last couple of years is that COVID is forced. Every company they've become a remote first company, at least temporarily, but you think a lot about environment and how that impacts culture. And so I'm curious, what have you learned about environment and what have you learned about culture in this transition from much more of a office centric culture to one that was forced, whether we all liked it or not to be remote 

Max Mullen: first, I think.

A big component of culture is the relationships that employees at the company have with each other, especially cross-functionally whether in the office or remote a team is going to have relationships with its members because you're in meetings together all day long, and you're working on the same things.

But one of the things that breaks down pretty quickly in a remote world is the relationships across teams. And cross-functionally, you're used to the office almost as a crutch where. You run into people in the hallway, you sit down and eat lunch with people and you hear what they're doing and you naturally get a good idea of who's around and what they're working on just by serendipity, that serendipity just doesn't exist in a world where all of your meetings are online.

So then the question becomes, do you try to recreate the hallway, serendipity and water cooler conversations on zoom? Or do you replace that relationship building with something new? Possible to do remotely. And I think the answer is the latter. We've tried a lot of virtual events and had virtual happy hours and those things work to an extent, but I think building relationships cross-functionally is something that is very important to culture.

And you have to rethink how you do that in a world. That's either remote or a hybrid of remote and in office work. 

Brett Berson: And what have you done in that area? Or what are you experimented? 

Max Mullen: What we've found is that you have to bring people together and create lots of opportunities for people to meet each other and get to know each other and build strong relationships.

Now, what I think doesn't work is creating happy hours without a purpose, and just bringing people together and hoping they show up. And what I think really does work. Having a real purpose for the event, for example, an industry expert or a speaker, bringing people together around that purpose or asking a few people to come together and solve a problem, have a brainstorm, or have a small group of people in a round table setting really work on something together.

I think through those types of events, you can help build cross-functional relationships. And then those relationships really start to matter later on when those people end up having to work together on. I'd be 

Brett Berson: interested to explore the opposite of what we've been talking about, which is what do people get wrong about culture?

And maybe it's in a lot of the conversations that you have informally with founders. Maybe it's through a lot of the angel investing that you've done over the past few years. What do you think people tend to get wrong or the mistakes that get made? Most often 

Max Mullen: I've invested in about 50 companies now.

And usually by the time. The companies don't have values or a mission statement yet. So one of my favorite things to do is to help those founders think about their culture at a really early stage. But one of the mistakes that I've observed, especially when I invest in companies at a later stage is people have just waited too long to think about culture or values.

They either put it off or they just don't understand how important it is. So I tell founders is it's kind of never too early to start thinking about your company culture and that defining company culture is one of the highest ROI investments you can make in the future. Of your company. It makes every hiring decision clearer, and the best people are attracted to companies that can clearly articulate their culture.

Just like they can clearly articulate their vision and their mission and their goals. So you don't necessarily have to be. Everything down before you make your first hire. But I do think it's valuable for founders to have a rough idea of who they want to be from a very early stage. If you don't think about culture early, you end up building a half hazard culture or you build culture accidentally.

And that tends to not lead to a strong and align and authentic. Culture. So I think when people wait too long, it can be sometimes be painful to undo that mistake. Another mistake I see is that people think that they can write their culture down and sort of set it and forget it. But culture is really never something you can put on autopilot.

It's really something that's an iterative process. So over time you stumble across new ideas or your team forms, new traditions, and then you should incorporate those things into your culture and it should evolve. And even things like the values and the mission, those cultural artifacts they should evolve to as the company grows over time.

So for example, at insert, we've had two sets of values. The nine years we've been around. And actually we're going to refresh our values soon between those two sets of values, some things changed and some things stayed the same. And so for example, we had eight values in the first set in the new set of values that we currently have.

We have five core values, and I would say about three of those five quarters. Our direct translations of one of the eight values we started with and the other two values were really added on to be more aspirational at the time. And so I think there's a couple of interesting components of refreshing a company's values.

One is what do you keep and what do you remove? And there is a couple of reasons why you might want to remove a value. One would be if it's been achieved, it was set out to be aspirational. You've become that person that believes that thing. And now you don't need that value anymore to guide. Or if a value is just not clear or not useful, probably it needs to be retired and that valuable slot can be taken up by a more important value.

You 

Brett Berson: mentioned that in the second version or your most recent version that you incorporated a couple of aspirational values, can you explain what you mean by that and maybe what 

Max Mullen: they are? So I think when you're refreshing your values, it's really important to think both about who you are today. And which parts of your current values are really working well.

And also to add in new values and to add aspirational qualities to your values. So for example, in 2016, when we wrote our current set of values, We really felt that cross-functional teamwork and collaboration was going to be key to our success. We have a really operational business and we also have a really large and cross-functional engineering product and design team, and we really needed those teams to work well together.

And so we wrote this value go far together, which speaks to the need to really work cross-functionally to achieve the biggest outcome. Now teamwork is obviously something that's important in every company, but this value really isn't about run of the mill teamwork. This is really about entire teams and the entire company coming together around a few key focus areas.

And when needed focusing all of our energy together as though we're all on one team against one or two really important goals. And so every day we referenced this value to go for it together, but then in really chemo. Where the company has to ask everyone to rally behind a certain goal, and we can kind of invoke this value in a big way.

And so we added it as a tool that the company could call on at several times in the past. We really use this value and come out ahead of on 

Brett Berson: a related note, going back to what we were talking about in terms of living or instantiating in the values. I think one of the things you did relatively early on was you created physical artifacts for the different values, and I'd be interested if you kind of explain what you did.

I think a lot of people maybe think about. The hashtags and things like that. But I think you've found something really interesting about the value of manifesting a physical object as it relates to values. 

Max Mullen: I think one of the best ways to operationalize your values is to reward people publicly against each one of them.

I think if you want people to think about. Use an idea. You have to hit them in multiple channels. Some of those might be digital. So talking about something internally at an all hands meeting, sending out an email about it, and some of those might be physical. So one of the things we did when we, for example, unveiled our mission statement is we made really cool company swag that had the mission statement written on it.

And we gave that out to all of our employees. Another thing we've done is we've created. As simple as it sounds t-shirts that have the values written on them. We've made challenge coins that have the name of each of the values on them. And we've given them to people when they've been recognized publicly at the company for doing something and they're collectible.

So there's a coin for each of the values. There's a coin for some of our company goals and there's actually coins for tenure. So there's coins for each year that someone's worked at the company. And in the past, we've given out coins as people hit their work anniversary. This 

Brett Berson: sort of idea of work anniversaries hits on an interesting topic as it relates to culture, which is also tied into the idea of how culture evolves that you were just mentioning as a company grows and scales.

You often have people that were there from the early days. And there's this interesting dynamic that I've noticed where. Those folks can be incredibly valuable. Having the person that's been at the company for six years or seven years. And at the same time, it can be fraught with all sorts of issues. And I think one of the dominant ones is that we all reflect on the past more positively.

Then maybe it was reality. And there's this balance, I assume that you have to figure out to leverage them and get the best of them, but you can also have all sorts of issues. And in some ways, complaints that maybe aren't valid in certain ways. And so I'd be interested in, do you have a really incredibly strong group of early Instacart folks that I think many of which are still at the company?

Does anything come to mind in terms of how you leverage that group and how you position that group to be super additive versus. For lack of a better word. I think what most companies have, which is a group of people that tends to complain or spends a lot of time talking about the good old this. 

Max Mullen: Yeah. I think every company typically has this group of OGs.

The early employees who've know how everything has worked at the company in the past. And I think what's really important is to make sure that those people are okay with change. Some of the things about the company that existed in its early days. What it is. And some of those things actually aren't that important to continue as traditions.

The prototypical example of this is that the OGs of the company, the early team have something that they're used to doing and that thing, or that tradition just doesn't scale very well as the company gets larger. And the key question to ask is, is that traditional. What made the company successful and what makes it a great place to work or is that tradition sort of a Relic of the past that can be retired.

And I think sussing out the difference between those two things is very important. Keeping what makes you unique and a fun place to work and then scaling it so that all the new employees can take advantage of it is really important, but also jettisoning the old traditions and things that just don't scale or that don't make sense for the company at its new scale is also important.

Brett Berson: What sort of an example of one of the early. Rituals or things that early employees loved that you decided should be scaled or should stick around. And how did you take something that was relatively unscalable and transition it into something that works for a company that's in the thousands of employees 

Max Mullen: in the first few years of the company, we were pretty small and we would bring people together two or three times a year, all in person, all in one place for usually a whole week, we would call these retreats.

And as the company got larger and particularly as we got more spread out, it didn't really make as much sense to bring everybody together for the same week. And especially didn't make sense for everyone to come to San Francisco. And so what we've done to keep this tradition around, but scale, it is actually have larger events at each of our larger offices.

An event in San Francisco and an event the same week in Toronto and another event, the same week in Atlanta, all with the same programming and the same swag and the same atmosphere, but we don't necessarily need everyone to be all at the same event at the same time. And then the leadership team can travel between those events.

So every employee gets sort of an experience of having time with the leadership team and having a great event at their local office, but you don't necessarily need to fly everyone to San Francisco for an entire week to make that work. Another tradition is. In the very early days of the company, we had our office in a house in south park, in San Francisco, and we loved this house.

I mean, the house was great. It had a kitchen and our living room, our desks were in weird places. Like my co-founder had his desk in a closet. An early engineer had his desk and a shower. And that familial homie culture was really important to us. Now, you can't scale your company in a house houses. Aren't that big.

You eventually need to end up in an office, but we've taken the care to make sure that all of our offices, even in big office buildings feel more like a house. Then they do like an office. So for example, the rooms, the communal gathering rooms are named things like the library, the study. And we have a lot of soft seating and couches and dark lit areas like living rooms spread out around the office so that people can sit down and relax and work in a casual environment.

And we've tried to keep some of that feeling, even though we aren't in the house. 

Brett Berson: It is ironic that now everybody, literally many people are working out of their showers or closets or whatever. So there's something poetic that 

Max Mullen: that's right. We're all basically back to working out of our bathroom. 

Brett Berson: Another part of this evolution of maybe early employees or OGs and how you leverage them over the company's life is the idea of politics and bureaucracy.

And the thing I've always found about politics and bureaucracy is no one says that when we're a big successful company, I want us to move incredibly slow. I want to reward the most political people and I'd love there to be tremendous amounts of bureaucracy, but on the inverse, I'd argue that most companies at scale get slower and reward politics and add tremendous layers of bureaucracy am curious, kind of what you've noticed in that area.

Over the course of the company's. 

Max Mullen: It's such an interesting question. Why do politics happen and can you actually avoid them? So I think the first thing to think about is what's wrong with politics. Why do we actually want to avoid bureaucracy in the first place and in other than being slow? I think the ideal state of a company is that it's a pure meritocracy, the best ideas.

The best people succeed and the least amount of time and friction occurs between when someone has a good idea. And when that idea is launched to customers and benefits them. However, when you're building a fast growing company and you're in the growth stage, you kind of need to add hierarchy. People need men.

There's a limit to the number of people a manager can manage effectively. And so you need layers of hierarchy. So the art of it is how do you add those layers without adding additional layers of politics and bureaucracy as well? So it's pretty hard to avoid completely, but you can push it back. And I think that that deliberate effort to keep the number of rules and processes low so that the company can actually continue to move fast is part of the.

Being a beer company, but operating a lot more like a small company. Sometimes people will ask, Hey, are we a startup? And I always say yes. And someone will say, well, how do you define a startup? We have this valuation, we have this number of. People we have this amount of sales, does that really make us a start up anymore?

And I said, well, even if you don't think we're a startup, don't you want to be a startup, doesn't a startup move faster and more agilely. The idea is that you want to, you want to be able to act like a smaller company, even if you're a bigger company. One of the ways of doing that is avoiding politics, but the other way is limiting the effect of politics and bureaucracy.

Or you can make it easier for people to make decisions without. Multiple layers of approval, for example, and you can create systems that really reward people for the work that they individually do, as opposed to lots of layers between people's work and the recognition of that work. 

Brett Berson: It's also interesting because I think a lot of politics is introduced by people that tend to be more political.

When you're scaling a company, you have the company itself, and then you have the people and as you get bigger and bigger, you tend to hire people with more experience. And as people grow in their experience, they've often worked in cultures that are political. And so they've developed this political muscle and then they bring it into your company, which seems tricky to manage.

And I don't think anybody wakes up in the morning and says, today's a great day to be super political backstabbing, and basically focus on all the work that has nothing to do with the work. But they often behave that way because it works to a certain extent or had war. And so I assume part of it is also like going back to values and behaviors, what is rewarded and what is not rewarded.

And my sense is that either implicitly or explicitly a lot of politics emerge because the founders or CEOs allow it to or encourage it. And in most cases, a pretty unintentional 

Max Mullen: way. I think you're right. And, and you just have to really have little tolerance for politics. And when it happens, I mean, you notice it, you have to jump on top of it and give people feedback and let them know that it's not.

Okay. Another thing that happens is you bring in senior leaders that come from another company and that company has a totally different culture. Well, it's very important that that leader come in and actually spend their first 30, 60, 90 days listening and figuring out. How the company works and what's working at the company before they go and change things.

And what quintessentially can happen is that new leaders come in and they, and they bring in their old ways of working and they bring in the direct reports they had from other old company. And they try to replicate what worked for them at their past company. As opposed to asking the question, what's going to work for me at this company.

It's amazing 

Brett Berson: how, how easy that is for people to like, do the cut and paste of company building, where you hire somebody from company X, they did it this way and they bring it to your company. The reality is there's a decent amount of stuff that doesn't copy and paste. Well, when you can do lots and lots of damage, I think part of the nuances always.

I think when you start to hire executives, there's this balance of ideally they're bringing tremendous curiosity and open-mindedness to understand what's going on here. What's special here. What's different here, but at the same time, most people are bringing executives to make change or impact the company.

And so there's this fine line. I think when it goes wrong, it's often. And executive wanting to show why you hired him or her into the company and make a big impact early on, and versus sort of taking that time to be quite curious and maybe not make a bunch of changes based on the way that they did something before.

Max Mullen: We're all creatures of habit. And so it's very natural for people to lean back on the way they used to do something at a new job. But I think it's really important that people listen and they have to figure out what's working well and should be kept the same and what's not working well and should be changed.

And so there's nothing wrong with a new leader coming in and making changes. There's nothing wrong with them bringing in great practices from their past companies. And of course, Love that, but what they need to do first is listen and hear everyone out. The two important reasons to do that is one figure out what's working, but two, and maybe even more importantly, build a relationship with all the people who you're going to be working with and who your changes are going to affect so that when you go ahead and make those changes, there's already a little bit of buy-in for what you're doing and kind of socialize the ideas before you make the changes.

And I think that step is something that people often miss. And then that leads to this feeling. This person being political. When in fact, all they're really trying to do is make changes that they believe in. It's just that the way that they're making that change or the changes that they're making are so different than what that team or that company is used to.

That there's a little bit of a shock. So just be a shock observer there. It's important to go around, listen to the team that you're coming into, have an open discussion about what's working and what's not working. And then come back in with your plan, including your changes, as opposed to the first thing everyone hearing from you is here's what I'm going to change.

Brett Berson: Who are the people that you've learned the most about culture from, or are there specific companies that you spent more time studying? That's influenced the way that you think about culture? And I'm interested in asking you this. Cause I know that you over the life of the company spend a lot of time getting out of the office and learning from other people.

It's a big part of the way that you figure things out. So be curious, are there certain people or ideas that they shared with you that are a big part of your worldview on culture? 

Max Mullen: I love talking to other founders and my peers at other companies about culture. And every time I do this, I learned something new.

Sometimes I learned really big things. And other times I just learned really interesting traditions that other companies have that I think are interesting to talk about. So for example, Matilda, that front has this tradition where new employees at front pick a Lego set and they build that Lego set and then they put it in the office.

And so the office is decorated with all of these. Built Lego sets from every new employee. And it sort of says something about each employee's personality and about the collective personality of the company. Gusto famously has a tradition where you walk into their office and they have a no shoes rule.

And this, I think really also helps set a friendly and casual tone. And that's something that I learned just by talking with Tomer. One of the founders at Gusto, I learned a lot by talking to employees who joined Instacart from other. I asked them about their past company's values and which ones they think worked really well and were successful and that they can remember.

And then I asked them examples of how those values changed a decision that they would make or. Influenced the thinking about how they worked at that company. It's actually so rare to learn about the values of companies that you don't work at. And so I sort of try to make sure I do that regularly. And I keep, I keep a library of other company's values and how those companies describe their own values.

Usually most of the time it's on their career sites, it kind of turns out that almost all core values boil down to one of the same 15 or 20 items. Transparency teamwork sense of urgency, craft, things like that. And I think it's kind of interesting to look at which things companies have chosen to list in their values and, and chosen not to list.

And that says a lot about the companies. And I think the founders 

Brett Berson: are there inserted this process of cataloging other values. Are there any companies or their values that really clicked or you thought felt unique or fresh for. 

Max Mullen: I think Airbnb has a value called be a serial entrepreneur, which really relates back to their founding story.

And I think that that's a really cool way to incorporate the history of a company into its values on a go-forward basis. We talked about Twilio's value of draw the owl, which I think is also really clever and really interesting. And memorable is something that 

Brett Berson: we touched on. The edges of that just popped to mind is what I've noticed is that it's often not the case, that there's necessarily good cultures and bad cultures.

There is the sense that there are toxic cultures or unhealthy cultures, but I tend to think that the biggest distinction between companies is strong culture. Versus weak cultures and either in reality or lore, a lot of them most special companies tend to have a strong culture and it's somewhat unique.

And so I am curious is you've looked across a lot of companies and invest in a lot of companies and built Instacart. What separates strong culture companies from weak culture companies. And is it just intentionality? Or is there something else going on when you reverse engineer these really, really strong culture?

Max Mullen: It's a great question. I actually think a strong culture is really defined by how often and how enthusiastically employees carry the whole. And litmus test of a strong culture is that anybody could name an example of how they used one of the core values of the company this week in making a decision, the values are present, they're useful, and they're cited frequently in a weak culture.

The values are thought of as company jargon, and they're just words on a wall and nobody really believes that they're true. And so it has to do more with how often the culture is authentically use. And how deeply employees believe in the culture that in turn is generated by again, the way you unveil values and the way you operationalize them every day.

And to your point earlier, if you just write the values and put them out there, probably people will forget about them. But if you remind people about the values every day, over time, you build a strong culture. If you use the values in. Visible decisions. And you acknowledge the fact as a leadership team, that the values are driving your decision making.

That gives people good examples of how to use the values themselves. And then they go off and do that would 

Brett Berson: so say that if you have a strong culture, does it mean that the way that that person accomplishes work at Instacart should ideally be different than the way that they accomplished work at wherever else?

Max Mullen: I think if you have a strong culture, it doesn't necessarily mean the way you work has to be different from another place. But I think a litmus test of a strong culture is that had people get the same scenario in different rooms and try to make a decision around it that the decisions would be made similarly.

And for similar reasons that the values and culture would guide people to making a decision in the way that your company should be making decision. 

Brett Berson: You started the conversation by talking about the idea of scaling consciousness in ultimately what that means? I think in a pragmatic sense, is that the way that people approach work, think about trade-offs, et cetera, in a vacuum, ideally are somewhat similar that to different people.

For example, in the context of Instacart approaching a retail partner of yours would approach that partner in a consistent way. And at that ability to scale judgment, particularly I think in the most interesting places is when there is not a clear right or wrong answer that anybody would immediately know that, that judgment piece or the way in which that decision might be made in times of uncertainty.

That is I think what makes culture so important and so valuable, it can provide extraordinary leverage. Because it is able to scale that consciousness or in times of ambiguity. How should we think about the world or this disease? 

Max Mullen: When you're just starting off, you're all literally in one room, whether that's remotely or in person.

And it's very easy to make the same kinds of decisions. And it's very easy to know what's going on because you're all together. But as a company scales, it naturally needs more hierarchy and that creates silos and that creates multiple rooms. And so the question is how do you get a whole bunch of people to be highly aligned so that they can make the right decisions together?

Without a really high burden of constant communication across each of those teams. And the answer is strong, aligned core values. 

Brett Berson: So I thought we could maybe wrap up by talking a little bit about what do you still find tricky about culture or what do you wrestle with? You've been a student of culture or practition of culture at Instacart for a long time.

What are the things that you continue to wrestle? 

Max Mullen: Culture has a lot to do with people's feelings and their everyday experiences and feelings are really hard to measure. And you can talk to people. You can survey people anonymously and conduct research, but at the end of the day, it's quite intense. And so one of the things I'm still figuring out is how do you measure culture at scale and how do you scale feelings?

How do you take something that was working for a company at a certain scale and made people feel a certain way? And how do you operationally scale that to a larger group of people? I think one of the things. Here that's a tactic is to again, find the culture carriers and accompany, and really expand the circle of people who are able to talk about culture authentically and build culture with you.

And that also helps you stay plugged in to the broader company because culture carriers by definition, understand what's going on in their area of the company or their team or department dealing with feelings is always tricky. And I think as much as feelings are a part of culture, that is something that I'm still sort of exploring.

Brett Berson: Yeah. And the fact that the way in which we all feel drives. A vast majority of the way that we work, the way that we experience work, the stories we tell ourselves about work and those feelings may or may not be representative of reality, or maybe not representative of the way that other people feel about something.

And so that seems endlessly 

Max Mullen: true. I think it takes a lot of empathy to work in this field because you have to talk to people all day long and you have to really get them to open up to you about what they think and what they feel. And you have to do that in an authentic way. It's a very tricky thing, but I love doing it well, thanks so much 

Brett Berson: for spending the time with us, max.

Max Mullen: Thanks for having me, Brett.