I like the track title, Culture as a Differentiator. At Buffer, culture is what makes us stand out, so it’s aptly named. My goal is to expand the bounds of awareness of all of the engineers and managers in the room, and help recognizing that culture is really important.

We have around 4000 applicants a month who apply to Buffer, and often tell us they know more about Buffer than their own company.

In the talk, I will discuss a bit on how we created this culture, how we defined our values, some of the lessons that we have had to learn going through the evolution, and some of our mistakes. I’ll also touch on how to create a positive culture into your organization.

We defined our values through a survey. We summarized not only our current values, but the perfect company’s values as well. But what do you do once you have defined those? Many teams have defined values--the real power is in how those values are implemented. How do you talk about those values? How do you apply those values?

We wanted to push those boundaries up until a point where we would recognize that we have reached a limit. As a startup, we define our product and its market fit through experimentation, through A/B testing. We applied those same principles to culture. We recognize it’s entirely possible to have your salaries public. I was very scared that day when we did that. We all were scared. There could be legal reasons why this was not a good idea. The one negative reason that I saw was now the competition knew how much they could poach our employees for. We thought of that, and said, if someone was going to be poached from our company, then it means it is a failing on our part. But why is someone leaving? Is it all about money? The culture, the environment don’t count? You can also see this as a great way to weed out people who aren’t part of your culture. And there are other benefits. We never have someone who says they expected to be paid higher after 7 hours of interviews.