Startup Culture in London
To understand the startup culture in London, we have to learn about the culture itself. Culture is the unwritten rules that define how a company functions. I am the founder of startups of London, and we’ve been interviewing London startups over the last six months. So far, we have visited more than 15 startups and asked them the question: “How do you define your startup culture?”, “What are the key pillars of your company culture?” There were some exciting responses. The key theme here is that founders do love talking about culture. They do pay lip service to that, but do they really practice it in their businesses? Let’s see some of the key answers some popular responses to the questions we have asked.
Watch the vignette of startup culture in London:
Culture is built on key pillars: Actions, rituals, symbols, and stories. These have different levels of importance in each sort of culture. However, one theme underlying all of those is that culture is how startups compete with each other and with other bigger organizations to get the best talent working for them.
The overall culture in London’s startups and within this ecosystem, what can we say about this? First of all, it is very diverse. In terms of the hierarchy, most of the organisations are very flat, and people are respected. It is, in a way, to be frank, even luxurious in obvious terms compared to some of the other working conditions around the world, but it is very demanding from the people side as well. Startup founders want people to feel like part of the teams. So, they are willing to give up equity and share the company’s success with the people they are working with. Overall, it is one of the strongest ecosystems in the world. People are fortunate to be part of the startups here in London, but it has its own growth areas.
These were some of the insights that we have gathered over the batch of interviews we have done in the last six months. Hope that was useful to you. I will see you at the next one!
How to survive Covid-19 as a startup?
As we all know, Covid-19 affected London’s startups in direct and indirect ways, and it has permanently changed the landscape for London’s technology businesses like the rest of the world. So we are interviewing key people of the startup ecosystem to ask them about their challenges and survival strategies in this hard time.
We hope that this interview series will be helpful and insightful for other startups in London out there. Because we believe that the most important thing is to learn from each other and be helpful to others, within this direction, you are welcomed to the first episode of our “Vignettes” series. You can reach all of them from here.
Also, you can find the full interviews in our “How to Survive Covid-19 as a Startup?” interview series. You can reach all of them from our Covid-19 Interviews YouTube playlist.
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Each week, we will be visiting a new startup office to meet with their team & founders. Stay tuned!
