Start-Up Culture Should Look Like This at Maturity

Last week, ride-sharing and food delivery start-up Uber released its fourth quarter and full-year 2019 resultsOpens a new window , which showed the popular app posting a net loss of more than $1 billion in the last three months of the year. There are lessons in what happens next for every young company.

Uber has struggled to achieve healthy margins since its inception and its disappointing Initial Public Offering (IPO) last year reflected a shift in focusOpens a new window across the tech industry from valuation to profitability.

In Uber’s results announcement, chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said the company was entering a new phase of its development, putting aside the initial expansion phase to focus on long-term sustainability. “We recognize that the era of growth at all costs is over,” Khosrowshahi said in a statementOpens a new window . “In a world where investors increasingly demand not just growth, but profitable growth, we are well-positioned to win through continuous innovation, excellent execution, and the unrivaled scale of our global platform.”

Uber’s struggles over the past few months reflect not just a move away from unbridled growth, but steps toward scaling back. In the months since its IPO, the company has made a significant number of lay-offs, and more than 1,000 peopleOpens a new window have been let go.

There are two significant tendencies at play now at the company: to recover from its poor IPO and to transition into a more mature company culture. Those two could seem synonymous and, in fact, failure is often the mother of introspection and maturity.

But moving to maturity isn’t the same as damage control.

When true development takes a backseat to cleaning up a mess, it’s almost guaranteed to be a superficial move without real changes for the company — which in the long run, does a disservice at a moment when real changes are exactly what the organization needs to mature.

To assess whether your start-up is showing signs of maturity, here are some guideposts:

Real leadership

Mature companies have a real leadership team. That means there isn’t too much power concentrated in one person but there are a handful of people committed to working together for the company’s future.

A mature leadership team might include a company founder, but it’s critical to make sure that the founder’s say is counterbalanced by other voices in order to avoid the founder problemOpens a new window .

Consequences

It’s not enough to have a leadership team invested in the future of a company. Ideally, the conditions for leadership and in some unique cases even company employees should be tied to company performance.

That shouldn’t be a punitive model but, rather, an opportunity to create a tangible feedback loop for good work. On the flip side, rewarding leaders even when the company has put in a poor performance sends them an unhealthy signal that their choices don’t ultimately affect them.

An articulated future

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the responsibilities and consequences of being a start-up developing into maturity. However, don’t get too bogged down in the need to take on more accountability as the company settles in to its new phase.

This can also be a creative time to generate ideas about what the next iteration of the company’s identity will entail and how it will continue to challenge itself. Just remember, being a player in a mature company means sharing that vision. So don’t shy away from committing goals to paper.