Cultural Integration: The Glue Of A Distributed Future
Global startups are best served by a global VC
Global startups are best served by a global VC
If you believe that the future will be a more open world, then read on to see why Iratel Ventures believes in the future of distributed work, how we are building culture in our team and how we are planning to help entrepreneurs build the most enduring culture in their startups.
Your team will be the most important part of your company regardless of its size. Culture is important to attract the right people and to ensure your team behaves as expected in different situations. If you want to achieve the best outcome, you should have your desired team culture documented. Some companies go as far as taking culture leadership to new levels of transparency.
Despite rapid advancements in collaboration technology, finding a true substitute for that “real life” collaborative experience is not easy. Therefore, you have to work extra hard to build trust and establish a company culture.
Iratel Ventures is a small partnership, our team is made up of five partners, each tasked with focusing on a very specific area. We are distributed between the UK, Denmark and Iran. We look for outstanding entrepreneurs based in North America, the UK and Iran. We travel a lot for in-person meetings with our own team and also with the entrepreneurs we want to invest in. We do this to build trust and make sure the cultures are aligned.
Philosophy
When we welcome a new partner to our team, which we expect to do every 3–5 years, we go through specific practices to align our philosophies. Iratel Ventures looks at the world through the filter of abundance. We think there is more than enough in the world to go around and create plenty for everyone. We don’t think water is scarce, we just haven’t found the most cost effective way to make it abundant for all yet. We don’t think food is scarce, we just haven’t imagined what it would be like if we could cultivate other planets. We knew people had the potential to speak to millions (or even billions) simultaneously, we just hadn’t created the kind of technology to support it.
We are searching for entrepreneurs who are going to use technology to unlock this potential and turn perceived scarcity to abundance. We are eager to learn from them about how they’re going to do this.
We believe scarcity elimination (abundance creation) can only happen at a global level which is why we insist on building global startups.
Values
Our values stem from this philosophy of abundance and are in perfect harmony with the world that is being driven by technology. Technology plays a major role in our lives today and has empowered individuals and groups to do more with less. To be creators and makers rather than pure consumers. It enables collaboration and communication at unprecedented speed and scale. With transparency this collaboration is reinforced and trust becomes easy to achieve.
Team Culture
We believe in and practice #givefirst and Conscious Leadership. The giver mentality gives us powerful energy to help others without having any expectation and helps frame our mind into helping others in any way we can. Once we can achieve this level of giving, the world will do whatever it can to help us sustain and grow it.
Conscious Leadership has 15 commitments which we study and actively remind each other about. We help each other find our genius which in turn helps us identify genius in entrepreneurs and startup founders.
In order to bring these values to “real life” and make sure we are on the right path, we get together every August for our annual partner’s retreat. We go through formal Conscious Leadership practices and talk about how we’ve been able to contribute to the community. We also look at technology trends that are going to affect our lives and make decisions on the areas that Iratel Ventures needs to focus its resources on for the year ahead.
Extended Team Culture
To solidify our culture with our stakeholders, limited partners and portfolio teams, we hold an Iratel Ventures Summit every December. During this 3-day event, we focus on what our portfolio companies are going through and arrange leadership and technical workshops for everyone. We also provide the annual Limited Partner Update during this event.
Community Culture
Our community efforts in building this global culture are centered around the hub we’re building on the 9th floor of our office. We are inspired by the “play bigger” and “futurity” themes and are incorporating these into our space and programmes.
This is where we will initiate strategic partnerships, talent management and global growth services to our team, startups, community and corporate partners.
If you are interested to get involved or keep up to date with the progress of our innovation hub, please register your interest here, leave a comment or like this post.
We’ve also been hosting the monthly Iratel Ventures Breakfast Series to have an open discussion on the current trends in the market and establish a reliable and continuous forum for global and local entrepreneurs and investors. We started these in January 2016 and have had the pleasure of hosting amazing groups since. You can read more about the events on our blog.
Culture creates tremendous long-term value
An example of a company that is doing a great job of helping talent find work in Silicon Valley primarily through culture is Andela. Their real work begins once they have chosen the top 1% talent in Africa by seamlessly integrating them in the destination company and having them meet in real life for a short period. They achieve this by focusing on culture building both ways. A quote on their blog really caught my attention: “It’s a bit ironic: as technology to empower remote communication improves, the challenge for startups increasingly lies in perfecting the human component.”
We are taking every step we can in strengthening this human component. This is where the real long-term value will be created. We want to be able to help the entrepreneurs we back with building a global culture and are putting services in place wherever they need them. We know this is a continuous effort that needs our close attention.
We will spend a lot of time identifying teams with similar values that we can invest in and help grow. Teams that believe in global growth executed by distributed teams that are bound together by a strong culture.
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دغدغه های کارآفرینی با محسن خلخالی
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This is the fifth in a series of posts about our investment criteria and ecosystem resources which was also posted on LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from teams with crazy (but commercial) startups. Get in touch or attend our breakfast series. Finally, don’t forget to get your IV Score or talk to our FundingBot to prepare for your next VC meeting.
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