Team Building 200 Feet Underground

I went spelunking for the first time last week. While I am not a spelunker by any stretch of the imagination, I enthusiastically descended hundreds of feet into California's largest cave complex in support of one of my portfolio companies. The company is called Splunk Technology -- aptly named after the task of debugging complex system failures by "spelunking" log files. Splunk enables IT organizations to more easily traverse the massive IT datasets created by the heterogeneous infrastructure of today's enterprises. In honor of the company's recent financing and launch, Nick Sturiale of Sevin Rosen and I went cave exploring with Splunk's founders, team members and advisors. I am pleased to report that Nick and I lived to tell the tale.

It is fair to say that I took my spelunking very seriously. I suppose that is a bit of a misstatement. I did not take the actual spelunking trip seriously. Anything but. It was all in the name of fun. But it was also very much in the name of team building. And that is serious business. I don't think that I can overstate the importance of community, team work and commitment in a startup. Startups are hard work and take a lot of sacrifice over time. They require teams of people to deeply believe in what they are building and the mission at hand. And in order to engender that sort of commitment to a company, team members have to view it as more than just a job, it has to be personal. To my mind, that is precisely what distinguishes startups from most big companies and what gives startups an unfair advantage.

Over the years I have seen lots of team building activity at startups. There is, of course, the obligatory company t-shirt, sweatshirt, hat, frisbee, pen, USB storage device, cocktail shaker, keychain, temporary tattoo . . . . While I've made fun of the t-shirt culture of Silicon Valley in the past, the truth is that nothing is more affirming than wearing your company colors. I am always hugely encouraged when I visit one of the companies in which I have invested and find people wearing the company gear. It suggests to me that the team is fully engaged -- people aren't just there doing a job, they are there working together in the name of building a great company, and they are literally wearing that commitment on their sleeves. To my mind, company t-shirts are a must have in startup culture.

The beauty of having company t-shirts is that you can then wear them to other team-building activities for your company. Over the years I've seen a wide array of group activities done in the name of camaraderie and corporate culture. Companies have long used ropes courses to challenge teams and force groups of people to work together more effectively. While these sorts of activities can be fun, they are often too contrived to get past the cynicism of Silicon Valley culture (plus, one of the entrepreneurs with whom I work recently nearly broke her knee trying to catch a colleague in a "trust fall" -- it's all fun and games until someone loses her knee). Along the lines of a ropes course, I've known a number of companies to attend cooking classes together. The group prepares a gourmet meal and eats it as a team (usually accompanied by good wine). This activity has always been a winner -- people love to eat and drink and the "be merry" part just seems to follow naturally.

Outings are another great solidarity builder. One company I worked with rented out a theater on the opening day of one of the Star Wars movies. Needless to say, this one went over big with the geek crowd. As does the Matrix and the Pixar movies. But don't try taking your technology startup to a screening of Enchanted April and expect to get much good will out of it (although you may engender team cohesion around their shear hatred of the movie). I've also known companies to rent out Kart Racing tracks, take cruises around the Bay, go disco bowling, take an outing to Great America and otherwise engage in group activities that we are all probably too old for but still thoroughly enjoy.

The key is to engage the company in some shared activity that brings them together as a group. Depending upon the team and the culture, that activity could be pretty much anything. I work with one company that has a spectacular Halloween decorating competition every year. The company is divided into groups by department and each department decorates its cubicles in a particular theme. As the years have progressed, the themes and decorations have grown more and more complex. Members of each group dress in theme-appropriate costumes, bake theme-related goodies and build massive structures to support their montage. The competition and party around it have come to characterize the friendly and creative culture of the company and ultimately serve to unite a disparate group of people around the shared goal of producing the best company they can. The Halloween competition is both a unifying and defining act for the company, and it has served the company well.

All startups are different. Not all companies could get excited about a Halloween decorating competition, or a spelunking trip for that matter. But all corporate cultures have unifying characteristics that can be strengthened through some group activity or other. There is no question that rappelling deep into a cave and crawling around its bowels with lighted helmets has brought the Splunk team closer together. It won't guarantee that they build a better platform for managing IT infrastructure but it will help the team to work together, united around that goal. I just pray that my next investment isn't in a company called SkyDive Systems or Bungee Enterprises.

Comments

[hamad alhomaizi]

david - that was a very poignant essay and i second you all the way. one cannot appreciate the trials of business without going through organizations with ill-fitting teams. they're most likely the ones where no conscious effort is made to build bridges or add a sense of camraderie. thank you.

[Michael Turner]

It's long been understood that undergoing danger and physical rigors as a group has salutary effects on group cohesion. People call it "team-building", but I think this is a misnomer. What's really going on is building something else: intimacy. That's an embarassing word, isn't it? But it's a useful ingredient for facilitating teams. What you're doing is getting strangers to be friends, in short order.

The corporation is a terribly artificial social institution, when you think about it. It's not a family, it's not a village, it's not a tribe. You take people from very widely varying backgrounds, selected primarily for their skills and for having some kind of track record, and you hope for the best. A million years of human evolution have done very little to prepare us for being thrown together on such an arbitrary basis, one that is totally unrelated to kinship. College provides some preparation for this kind of experience, but ... look at the game, it's completely different. You throw a bunch of strangers together and ask them to compete, not cooperate. Certain friendships emerge as some students cooperate in small clusters (the study group); others emerge as students take refuge from the competition, finding camaraderie in extracurricular activities.

Computers have made the office a physically more dangerous place, but the risks people take at the keyboard are purely individual risks, and the resulting degradation of health is a gradual process. It's a private and chronic hell, not a shared purgatory. We are what the Stone Age made us, as a species. Small wonder, then, that group cohesion is better fostered by taking dramatic physical risks together, and making each other responsible for each other's safety from real and immmediate dangers.

There is no reward without risk. Some of my best friends are people I went rock climbing with. But people die out there, sometimes. Spelunking is even more dangerous. Can corporate America really reasonably ask of their employees that they go out and take real risks in the name of goals that seem to mostly benefit investors?

Splunk sounds like a great team, but it's probably a great team of software engineers who were originally a great team of cavers, who got sick of their respective jobs, and formed their own company. Can this be routinized? Can it be turned into a formula for success? I don't think so.

[Michael Baum]

Actually Splunk was started by a team of entrepreneurs who have started four other companies together. We are entrepreneurs and software engineers first. Spelunking caves is only a recent endevor, although one we all fell in love with quickly. What we have "routinized" to use your word, is the practice of identifying frustrating problems and building solutions to solve those problems with interesting new approaches. I don't know if this is something that can be reduced down to a precise formula, but there certainly are people who have studied the act of creating disruptive new technologies and the market dynamics associated with it. For more on this check out Clayton Christensen's talk at the Open Source Business Conference 2004.

Happy Splunking...

[Michael Turner]

Shame on me for making assumptions. I think my basic points stand, however: you're friends, through thick and thin. That thick and thin may have started with doing startups together, and taking physical risks together happened to follow naturally for you. Does it really matter in what order it happens? It's the personal affinities (please don't call it "social capital") that gave you traction either way.

I was not speaking of "routinization" of the process creating "disruptive new technologies and market dynamics". The benefits of going on an adventure together are primarily in fostering group cohesion quickly. However, no ropes course (nor shared cooking lessons, for that matter) will transform people who are not original or perceptive enough for disruptive technology and the market dynamics thereof into people who are.

T-shirts can't do this either. If I were running a company where I suspected some latent, unexpressed reserve of talent and initiative, I might perform a little experiment: issue a memo banning company t-shirts as a sterile exercise in faux solidarity, and see what happens. If, within a week, some 20% or more of employees were wearing a bootleg t-shirt with some brilliant smart-ass rejoinder on it, I'd know I'd struck gold. (And would start wearing the t-shirt myself, with a clown hat, for a week, as the beginnings of building bridges to the rebels.) If they all sullenly knuckled under, I'd know there wasn't much ore to be mined.

[Robert Hoffer]

When Team Building Goes Bad

A few years ago at one of my companies my co-founder, purely by hapenstance, stumbled upon a martial arts dojo that was going out of business; he noticed that the sub-lease provision on the place was highly favorable at a time in Silicon Valley when rents were peaking -- making the dojo sub-lease a good deal. The dojo sensei came along with the deal.

This was not any sensei mind you, this was a sensei master in the art of kempo - an ancient sword-fighting technique. So my colleague struck a deal with the kempo-sensei to teach sword fighting once a day to all of the engineers in our fledgling firm's engineering office.

Our firm had two offices, an East Coast sales and marketing facility and a West Coast engineering facility. Once a day, the entire West Coast team took an hour after lunch to learn kempo. Team building.

Unfortunately, neither the senior manager, our engineering VP or our senior product manager felt inclined to engage in sword-play; so they opted out. When the swords started flying - they sat by their posts toiling away on the day's projects as required by the job all the while building up resentment at the intrusion on their staff's valuable work-day.

Far from fostering a group spirit this seemingly harmless team building attempt had the opposite effect; it alienated people who either felt uncomfortable with the approach or who by virtue of being 3,000 miles away were not able to participate.

This type of artificial management imposed team building can be a serious problem. As I read David's blog I imagined my own horrific spelunking experience ... way back in summer camp when I was 10 years old. Deep in a cave in the Poconos the leader of the team suggested that I explore a tunnel and up I went into a cold, cramped dark hole. I was terrified of what I might find. When I wiggled my way back down out of the hole into the main cavern none of my comrades were there; having cleverly slipped into an adjacent cavern. I was alone and terrified. I started to cry. I thought I had come down the wrong way and gotten lost in a cave. When the joke was sprung - I being the brunt of it - felt alienated. And that alienated feeling stayed with me for the rest of that summer. I felt apart from my bunk-mates because of it. Alone. I've not been spelunking since.

I imagine this is the feeling that many people have when they are forced to do 'dangerous' things with a team. Rather than cohere everyone you run the risk of alienating members of your team.

A word of caution on team building - make sure everyone is really on board before you launch into one of these seemingly harmless episodes or you may find yourself fostering secretly negative feelings amongst your team members. Real team spirit cannot be forced.

:-)

[ned]

Didn't take the spelunking seriously? Then someone had to take it seriously for you. People who behave this way in risky, unforgiving environments are called assholes. Their actions often lead to unneccesary tragedy.

Somehow, these jerks often survive while those whom they hire to pay attention for them die from cascading and avoidable errors caused by the smug indifference of their inexperienced clients.

Suppose someone with your attitude packed your parachute or your ropes? How would that be?

[Whippet]

What silliness. T-shirts, spelunking and friggin' Halloween parties. Christ, does this "VC" know anything at all about the real world of business building???

Company cultures don't get built in California caves or skydiving or go-karting, or whatever other silly things West Coast VCs think are "cool". They get built every day, 8-6, through hard work and graft and interaction. That may not be funky Red Herring Silicon Valley VC bubble stuff, but it is the real world.

It amazes me how Ventureblog has so little of interest or depth to write about. T-shirts and spelunking!! I guess I expected more thinking and more originality from a VC blog. (Come to think of it, ALL the VC blogs are Dullsville...)

[Sramana Mitra]

David - I just wrote an article called "In Here" not "Out There" which you and your readers may enjoy. Sramana

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