What I think about culture
The last year has been really enlightening. I have learnt so much - it has to an enormous extent humbled me and really taught me the value of listening, thinking and learning. One thing I have been thinking about a lot recently is culture.
We started Arkly in partnership with my previous employer. They were gracious enough to give us office space and operational support but I have come to realise that this was a big error. For a long time I had disregarded blogs about starting your company inside your living room but I now know that is a big tactical bonus. The reason - its important to culture.
Without even realising it Arkly picked up the culture of a much bigger organisation (because we were working beside one). A start-up should be scrappy and tenacious, it should be about working all night and doing anything to get your product ready and out there. Now we did a lot of that - we worked endless hours but we were surrounded by people who didn’t. And it had an effect. It instilled a certain “comfort” that it shouldn’t have.
My good friend Michael Hayes and I are now talking about a new venture and this one we won’t make the same mistake - it’ll be working out of our bedrooms and living rooms and spending almost nothing on it (because we don’t have any capital at the moment to actually spend on it). I believe both of those things will actually be an advantage to us. We will be a scrappy insurgency going up against some big players and we will disrupt them - because we can move fast and they cant, we are nimble and they aren’t.
It seems silly but given what I know now I would choose starting a company from a living room with no money to working from an office with money.