I spend a lot of my time thinking about workplace wellbeing in the tech industry. There are many great companies with awesome employee benefit & perks, but that don’t necessarily translate to the sense of wellbeing among people at work. Why is that? I started hypothesizing that 1) things like benefits or perks aren’t the fundamental components for the culture of wellbeing and 2) the seed of wellbeing is planted at the very beginning in the startup-phase.
“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener. (Bill O’Brien)”
The common five key factors of startup success are: ideas, business model, team, funding, and timing (Bill Gross, Idealab). Ultimately, these are connected to the successful exit — IPO, acquisition, acquihire, etc. However, what is the fundamental driver for these key factors? Customer acquisition & retention? No — it’s the interior condition of the startup founders and teams that engage (“intervene”) in the daily grind at workplace. In fact, the research by Idealab shows that “team” is the second most critical factor of startup success after “timing”, which is not really in anyone’s control. But the team and its culture can be.
This is why I developed Start Up Yourself (TM). Start Up Yourself is a program to support startup founders and their teams to create and utilize the internal and external support system, so that they could achieve their goals sustainably with a sense of wellbeing. I had so much fun showcasing this program with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Korea and d·camp in March. I wrote about Start Up Yourself pilot with AWS in this post.
READ: Why Start Up Yourself
I look forward to helping all founders invest in starting up themselves so that they become successful with their startups.
