Dan Rose Profile picture
Apr 3, 2021 17 tweets 3 min read Read on X
What defines a great company culture? I worked for two iconic companies and founders with nearly polar opposite cultures. Amazon was heads-down, secretive, forthright. Facebook was open, transparent, collaborative. Here's what I learned about culture working for Bezos and Zuck:
Culture implicitly sets expectations for behavior. Strong cultures are well-defined with sharp edges, and well-understood by everyone in the organization top to bottom. Strong founders with unapologetic personalities set the culture early and maintain it as the company scales.
When I joined Amzn in 1999, we had top-secret teams working on new products like Auctions, Toys and Electronics. Before a product launched, the only people in the know were those who needed to know. Everyone else was told to keep their heads down and focus on their own work.
When I joined the secret team working on Kindle, my job was to convince publishers to create digital books. They couldn't understand why we suddenly cared about ebooks when nobody at the time was reading them. I begged Jeff to let me share our plans for Kindle but he refused.
Jeff was taking a cue from Apple. Tim Cook once shared with me that Apple put a precise dollar value on the free press they received from big product announcements, which was undermined by leaks. Secretive cultures try to avoid leaks by locking down information.
There's nothing wrong with a heads-down culture where employees are told to focus on their own work. It provides guardrails, avoids distractions, sets a serious tone. And yet, there is a certain distrust in telling employees to mind their own business. The knife cuts both ways.
When I joined FB in 2006, I was shocked at how much Zuck shared with the company. I advised him to share less to avoid leaks. His response: "I'm building a company that I would want to work for if I hadn't started FB. And I would want to work at a place that shares openly."
FB's open culture mapped to Mark's personality and a generational shift in employee expectations. It also mapped to Facebook's products which were built on sharing. Open cultures assume employees are less likely to leak if they are trusted and empowered with confidential info.
Transparency allows for ideas to come from anywhere in the organization. Teams at FB prolifically collaborate, share feedback, communicate. But at its worst, this type of culture can devolve into entitlement, insubordination, ceaseless complaining. The knife cuts both ways.
Open vs closed is one dimension of a company culture. FB was also more egalitarian, Amzn more hierarchical. Both companies had a high tolerance for failure (compared to Apple for example). The important thing about culture is clarity & consistency, especially as a company scales.
When we developed company values in the early days at FB, Zuck didn't want a bunch of corporate dribble postered on the wall. I argued against "Move Fast and Break Things" but Mark chose it precisely because it was controversial, clearly signaled culture of velocity & iteration.
Amazon's most memorable value was "ruthlessly escalate." This removed any question about how decisions would be made. It encouraged a culture where people would debate strongly held ideas, knowing the solution to disagreements was to bump it up to the next level of management.
Culture is maintained through rituals. I once showed up for Zuck's Friday Q&A with only 3 other employees, and Mark proceeded to answer our questions for an hour. 15 years later he still religiously hosts Q&As with all topics on the table. This is FB's ritual of transparency.
Walmart's culture was defined by Sam Walton's relentless work ethic and frugality. He held his management meetings on Saturday and charged employees 5 cents for cream in their coffee. Walton died in 1992 but the company still holds Saturday meetings and charges extra for creamer.
They key to a strong culture is consistency from the top. The CEO's job is to make sure everyone on the management team is on the same page. If a senior leader wants to create their own unique culture for their part of the org, they can't be allowed to stay.
The partnership between Mark and Sheryl was forged by their mutual commitment to a unified culture across the company. There can be small differences based on the work to be done, but core values must be shared across product and business teams. There can only be one CEO.
There are many benefits to a strong culture: it makes interviewing easier, gives employees a sense of belonging, helps avoid politics, provides energy and zeal, cuts through a lot of BS. No culture is perfect, but great companies and founders are highly intentional about culture.

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More from @DanRose999

Jan 8
My personal habits, insights and inspiration to stay sharp in business and life:
Read biographies before bed

I go to bed every night reading biographies. Studying great leaders from history reveals clear themes and patterns. And by falling asleep to heroic stories, the lessons seep into your subconscious. amazon.com/Churchill-Walk…
Be vulnerable

Deep and lasting relationships are built during moments of vulnerability, leading to a foundation of trust. Nothing is more rewarding (and uncomfortable) than human connection formed through authentic interaction.
Read 12 tweets
May 24, 2023
Watching the movie Air reminded me of a few times in my life when I trusted my gut and put all my chips on the table. You can’t be successful in business without taking risk, and there’s no guarantee it will work out. But when it does… Here’s a story about my big bets:
After my first year of business school at U Michigan I got a summer internship at Amazon. 3 weeks into the job they offered me a full-time position. I had a wife and 18 month-old baby. Amazon was a 5 year-old start-up, though already a public company.
When I told my friends and family I was dropping out, everyone thought I was making a huge mistake. But I knew I would learn more about business at Amazon than in school. Allison & I never looked back, literally. We hired movers to pack our stuff and never set foot in Ann Arbor.
Read 10 tweets
Dec 9, 2022
The best companies always have a strong senior leadership team, filled with people who complement each other and play well together, like a winning sports team. Here’s how I built my career by learning how to play my position at the highest level:
As a kid, soccer was my primary sport. I played center half-back and rarely scored a goal, but I was the leader in assists. I was co-captain of my high school varsity team, along with my best friend who played striker and scored most of our goals.
On the other hand, I made the mistake of thinking I should play quarterback on the football team. I rode the bench as 3rd-string QB until I switched to wide receiver where I had more success. (Eventually I left the team and found a new way to assist, as a male cheerleader!)
Read 12 tweets
Nov 20, 2022
I love to read autobiographies of people who started iconic companies. I was fortunate to work for Zuck and Bezos as their origin stories were still being written, and it's fun to pattern match against other founders. Here’s a list of some of my favorite business biographies:
1/ The Autobiography of a Founder: It’s one thing to be a great founder, it's another thing entirely to write a compelling book about your life and your company's origin story. Each of these iconic CEO’s wrote amazing autobiographies:
Sam Walton wrote an autobiography shortly before he died, and it's so good I’ve read it twice. When Walmart sued Amazon in the 90s for poaching executives, Bezos quoted from Sam’s book in his defense :-)
amazon.com/gp/product/055…
Read 21 tweets
Oct 2, 2022
The best tech companies drive strategy through product. This is why founders and CEOs tend to be product leaders, and product / design / engineering is more important than ops / marketing / finance. Here’s what this looked like for me as a business leader at Amzn and Facebook:
Jeff and Mark were very different, but both of them spent most of their time in product meetings, and they both scrutinized product ideas down to the pixel. They didn’t waste cycles debating strategy in the abstract, they drove it via the roadmap. They never hired consultants.
Everyone in the company understood the strategy because it showed up in the product’s evolution. There was no need for long slide decks explaining where the company was going. Company all-hands meetings simply focused on the product roadmap. Our product leaders were the stars.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 8, 2022
When I first started out in my career, I thought I had to “fake it until you make it.” Later I learned to ask questions and embrace situations where I didn’t have all the answers. Here's how I went from being an insecure manager to a more honest leader:
Amazon was my first real job, and I found myself surrounded by brilliant people with strong opinions. Everyone seemed to know exactly what they were talking about, and Jeff Bezos was the smartest person in the room. It felt to me like a culture where the strongest survived.
In that environment, I thought I needed to project confidence. For example, after a promotion to merchandising manager, I was asked about my forecast for gross margin vs contribution margin. I barely understood these concepts at the time, yet I pretended to have clear answers.
Read 18 tweets

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