Photo by Nemo Yang
Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.
We’re in the age of tech startups, but these startups have a critical problem: company culture. Highly skilled experts are needed to achieve tech goals, but startups take time to build a reputation that will retain leaders and creators. You might think it’s hard for startups to attract such experts, but they’re coming. Nemo Yang, CEO of Cortex and a seasoned startup entrepreneur, says it’s important to understand that. why. why The initiative to invite experienced professionals to join startups is why Keep them for the long term why This makes company culture key to a startup’s success.
Want top professionals to work for your unknown startup? why?
Now, Nemo Yang is transforming Cortex AI into an industry-changing startup, entering the financial sector and automating the tedious manual review process that no one wants to do in the first place. But before that, Cortex was starting from scratch, and Yang remembers asking himself, “Why would really talented people want to work for you, a startup that no one knows? You’re small and unknown.” But at the same time, startups needed high-tech experts ready to jump in on the job with a limited budget. It was strange to have such highly skilled people applying, but it was essential to recruit and retain them.
Yang thought long and hard about why these people were applying to his startup and tried to understand how to recruit them. “I realized,” Yang says, “that people aren’t actually working just for money or prestige. We’re all human beings. I think fundamentally, humans want to belong.”
Yang points out that people spend more than half their lives at work and not only do they want to do something that matters at work, but they also want to do that work with people they can connect with: “Sometimes who you want to work with is much more important than what you’re working on or how much you’re getting paid.”
Startup culture is who you hire
“You want your team members, especially early on, to be warriors,” Yang said. “They’re here because they have a mission and they’re here because they love working with the people who are here. That’s a strong foundation to build on at the beginning, and that’s really hard to find.”
Yang says the key is to stop selling what you do and start focusing on who you are: “The key message to send is that you’re unwavering and authentic, because that’s what determines who people want to work with.”
This is the first and most important step in cultivating a strong company culture. A startup’s culture is only as good as the people who build it. This is easy to understand once you think about it. Yang says he wants people who can say, “I want you to join me because I believe we can achieve greater things together as a team.”
Trust in team dynamics, belief in synergies that can grow into great outcomes, is what a startup’s culture will be. Nemo Yang hired a team that believed in their vision to change the industry. They’re working together to develop Cortex as a tool to change the mortgage process, enable more diverse and inclusive lending practices across the industry, and free workers from repetitive, low-value work. When you hire a team that understands your vision and motivations, believes in those things, and feels connected to you as a leader, you build a team that believes in each other. That’s the culture a startup needs to survive and thrive.
