We first met Dave Kashen a few years ago after he sold the startup he co-founded. He had just started coaching fellow startup execs on scaling and building their businesses. But what was unique about Dave was his precise thinking about culture and values, two of the squishiest and most important concepts for any leader in a startup. Since then, he’s been advising some of the best startup teams in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, so we’ve asked him to come and talk about the importance of and–more importantly–how to build extraordinary cultures at startups.
The Values-Driven Startup: Building an extraordinary culture
Drawing insights from Google, Facebook, Netflix, Zappos, Eventbrite, Southwest Airlines, Trulia, JetBlue, Meebo, Joie De Vivre, and many others, startup coach Dave Kashen will share a methodology for building and scaling an amazing, high performance culture that will maximize your chances of success, and help you enjoy the journey.
As co-founder of Wellsphere, a fast-growing online health startup, Dave experienced firsthand the challenges of creating a great culture amidst the demands of building a company from the ground up. After Wellsphere was acquired, he took a step back to figure out what he really wanted to do with his life, and realized that his life’s purpose is to help people be fulfilled and increase the level of well-being in our society. Seeing business as a platform for increasing fulfillment and well-being, he made it his mission to inspire, empower and teach entrepreneurs to build companies that bring out the best in their people.
Through his firm Quantum Leading, Dave has spent the last few years working with startup CEOs and their teams to help them to intentionally and systematically build their cultures, and develop as authentic, inspired, values-driven leaders. He co-founded the Unleashed conference series, bringing together hundreds of startup CEOs with leaders who’ve created some of the world’s best cultures to learn about and discuss how to build workplaces people love. Dave also writes about building startup culture at awesomeculture.com.