<aside> 💡 A quick look into Capchase's culture and values: how they evolved and some of the things we've done to deploy them.
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<aside> ⚠️ Disclaimer: We certainly don't know everything. We're a very particular company that's grown in a very special time, so not everything will apply to everyone (watch out for Survivorship bias!). However we hope you find something that inspires you.
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<aside> 💡 Capchase is an early-stage fintech startup with the mission of putting FinOps on autopilot. We help founders forget about fundraising or cash management and focus on what matters: putting out great products and distributing them.
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We started Capchase in May of 2020 - a year and a bit ago - under some very special circumstances. We hit scale quite early on, jumping from 15 employees in December to ~70 employees across 20 nationalities and 14 cities today. We operate in the United States, UK and Spain, and growing fast through Europe, serving hundreds of tech-enabled recurring revenue companies.
Capchase in Aug '21
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Capchase in Aug '20
Our team is heavily distributed, with ~40% in the United States - mostly New York, and the remaining ~60% spread across Europe, especially in Madrid and Barcelona.
Everything that happens early on in a startup is important. The nature of our companies is that what we do in the beginning gets magnified in time. There is something exponential in our nature. If you have product-market-fit twice as fast as a typical company, you won't grow twice as fast in a year, but rather in a faster, non-linear way - maybe 4 or 8 times faster. The same thing happens with Culture. The base you set early on expands very quickly in the organization, and so the kind of people you bring on at the very beginning can define the culture for years to come. It's like an interest that compounds:
Getting a nice rate at the beginning can make or break a company.
<aside> 💡 TL;DR: Everything that you do in the early stages compounds massively. This applies to Culture too - the first 10-15 employees will define the culture of the next 100, and those the Culture of the next 1000. Every lever that you move now is magnified.
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Defining what Culture is quite hard. At Capchase we try to be very pragmatic. Finding a definition doesn't necessarily add any value, so instead we focus on the outcome of a great culture: how decisions are made.
<aside> 💡 Culture at Capchase: what the people in the company do when the boss is not there.
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When we first raised this question at Capchase, we reached the conclusion that Culture is how people in the company behave when they have to make decisions. How any given Capchaser would act when no-one is looking. This let us build a sort of North Star prototype of the kind of people we wanted to have in the company. From here, it was easier to pick the Values that we strive for, which is a significant piece of the Capchase culture. The rest of the culture - our ethics, work environment, beliefs, and leadership style - sort of organically evolved from there.