Progress

One of the exciting challenges and opportunities with any new startup is creating and defining your culture. As a VC, we see lots of new companies start, but what is a little unique for us at True is that we are starting ourselves. When it came time for us to discuss our firm “norms,” we put a premium on respecting and valuing an entrepreneur’s time. This means direct and thoughtful communication, transparency, and follow-through. We also discussed meeting behavior and norms, but it got fun and interesting when we discussed pet peeves. One peeve that we share as a team (and an urge that we fight ourselves) is “checking your Blackberry while in a meeting.” Last week at TED, Daniel Goleman coined the new term, “pizzled.” This is the feeling you get when someone you’re talking with is Blackberry obsessed. It’s a combination of being puzzled at why, at that particular instant, someone decided to interrupt an otherwise good conversation with a glance at his/her Blackberry and being pissed that he/she did so. This really amused the TED crowd, likely because this feeling is so universal and so rarely acknowledged.

Though we live in a fast-paced and constantly connected world, one of our core beliefs at True is the power the, “human moment.” When it came time to set up our internal culture and meeting norms, we (of course) said, “no Blackberries in meetings.” But this turns out to be much harder in practice than in theory. We have committed to this in both internal and external meetings, and we’d ask you to hold us to it.

Here’s our latest innovation that has been effective recently (seen outside the True conference room). We have not patented it and will gladly democratize it in open source fashion.