Lesson: Team & Culture with Dave Kashen

Step: #1 Purpose: Learn why it's important to build a purpose-driven culture for your customers and team

So the notion of purpose has become a bit cliché, and people sort of think like, “Oh my god, this vision statement that sounds really lofty, and put it on the wall somewhere or put it on a shelf somewhere or in a file drawer somewhere. Okay. I did that.” I think a more useful way to think about purpose, that connects back to your customers especially, is what's the experience that we want to create for people, especially customers. What's the experience we want to create for our customers?

What I think is so useful about that question is that it anchors you in something that feels meaningful, because I think ultimately it's all about experience. So if you're constantly focused on experience you want to create for people — delight, relief, joy, whatever it is in the realm that your startup is playing, a few things happen.

One, the particular strategy and tactics you use become more malleable. If you're fixated on the experience you want to create for your customers, it allows you to be malleable in a really useful way, because then you're optimizing for that experience, and you're trying different strategies, different tactics to see what creates that experience.

I guess the precursor to that experience is something that the customers actually want and value, because you need to have a core value equation where the value you're providing is greater than the cost that they have to pay. Otherwise, you don't have a business. That would be something else, like a nonprofit or philanthropic endeavor.