Just Thoughts #3: The Beat of Slush (from way back when) and DEI-learnings.
In the last article, I briefly introduced an operating model I've imagined; in this one, I revisit old design choices through the new lens. Also, I cover a few DEI learnings I've accumulated at deidei
The content in this article is “handwritten” - and only co-piloted with Grammarly’s tune copyediting and spell-checking. The content is free to read; if you want to support my writing work, you may buy my poetry collection on Gumroad here.
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The highlight of the week:
Deidei launched their e-learning module, making the self-studies of your DEI journey easier! Check it out here.
This week's edition includes revisiting old stories in a new frame. I've previously written some of these stories published on other platforms. However, I pulled everything down to start with a clean slate. This article is merely an effort to see if I can deliver the narrative in the new frame, in written form, according to the new narrative frame under time pressure. To see if I've been able to grasp my own models.
Additionally, I cover some learnings on my journey with deidei and the act that, with the help of the marketing agency BOU, the deidei team launched new web pages and the first learning content course. I’ve also gained a few DEIB-related learnings I share with you and the first book I read on the matter, “why I’m no longer talking to white people about Racism.” is shortly reflected upon together with my own biases.
I’ve also come to find due to my personal schedules I’ll likely write two articles in one week, to not have to always cover the same ground every week. As much as I love writing finding the time for it is seemingly impossible at times.
The headlines in this blog post;
The Beat at Slush way back when
The context
The structure
The Heart of the team (way back when)
The Beat of the team (way back when)
The Hustle of the team (way back when)
DEIB-Learnings
deidei’s new e-learning & webpage.
The Beat at Slush way back when
I was part of the non-profit organization Slush, whose mission is to support founders by creating an annual flagship event (The world’s leading startup event) in Helsinki, Finland. It’s run by a core team whose average age is usually mid-20s, co-piloted by an event production company (Sun Effects) comprising Finland's most experienced event producers.
Think of the setup as your software company would essentially have its entire product development team under a separate entity with an entirely different operating culture. Both organizations have worked in what, mainly over the years, has been a seamless symbiosis. What makes it work despite the cultural differences within the organizations is their love for what they do and ambition to be the best in the world at what they do.
The Context
I will skip Slush's origin story and the evolution of the “raison d'etre.” I’ll also refrain from analyzing how the event is different from what it was back when I was a part of the organization, nor will I make any statements about where it should be heading. That has always been the job of the next generation of leaders within the organization. I wouldn't say I liked it whenever the previous generations gave their perspectives without being solicited for feedback. I’ll instead cover how we made the operations work and shed some light on the philosophical reasoning for choosing such an operating structure.
In April 2014, I was introduced to the COO of Slush at the time, Riku Mäkelä; as of the time of writing this article, he is the COO at Doordash. At the time, the team had eight people on payroll, aiming to scale up a few thousand volunteers for the event in November. Additionally, the event was moving venues due to growth and going from 10,000+ attendees to aiming for 15,000+ that year.
The team was looking for a “Head of parties” to care for all the events outside the main venue. I can’t recall how many “team leads” were hired that year; essentially, they were volunteers (not getting paid) but managers within their responsibilities. The difference between “the core” and those recruited as “Team leads” was payroll. Those in the core team got compensated a monthly salary equalling something a summer trainee/intern still in university would get according to Finnish market standards. I personally never really cared about the difference at the time. All I wanted was to measure up to the people I found around me.
I did something good as the then-leading figures Miki & Atte asked me if I wanted to become the Executive Producer for the event. The role at the time was “being the Product Manager” for what was “the product.” I can say this in retrospect: I had no clue what the role was about at the time, but I said yes without hesitation. Something to note about the event at the time was that nobody thought about a future beyond that year's event. It was a matter of getting it done or going extinct. When you operate within the event industry, you usually commit to 90% of the costs when you have 10% of the income. The operating risk margin was also budgeted at less than 1% due to the “non-profit” basis. However, this was ridiculous in terms of financial planning. Nonetheless, that was the reality at the time.
What you did have was one of the most effective recruiting engines most stock-listed companies could ever dream of creating. A highly diverse volunteer pool of thousands of people who usually feel they are working for something bigger than themselves. A fully-fledged training program on all levels of the organization, ranging from leadership to customer success. There also was and is a habit that was
1. Critical to business success
2. Something everyone does
3. Doing it sets the event apart from the rest and is hard to copy.
The habit was “Talkoot,” a word used to describe a communal event where everyone labors for the community's common good. During the Slush Talkoot, volunteers, core members, and event producers worked to create crafted event props from recycled material. It’s critical to business success as the “domain” is events, and making handcrafted props brings an unprecedented level of detail to the elements of the event. When it’s something everyone does, from the CEO to the single volunteer, it breaks the hierarchy. When leadership is present for these events, it’s a straightforward way to show what is essential. Whenever leadership was not present, it constantly, and I kid you not, always hurt the team's morale. Year in, year out, without exception.
The labor hours it takes to create something like that is mind-boggling. With paid labor, it becomes almost impossible, according to market standards. However, I’ve always personally liked the fact that whether as a single volunteer going back just to be “one among the rest” or when you held the title “President” creating a thing at Talkoot, to be able to see that one thing event filled me with a sense of joy. The same effect may be created when your workforce can leave their mark in their work environment (like an office).
This level of effort and dedication gives the premise of being a Slush volunteer a status symbol. Additionally, coming back to the recruiting engine, you rarely got “hire rank” the following year if you did not perform the previous year, and due to the “no pay” policy, only those dedicated enough stuck with it until the end. You can argue that this discriminates against those with a higher cost of living, which is the point. However, that was by design. Slush for “the core team” is a career springboard; if you go back, volunteer. Additionally, you may think this setup gives the premise of unhealthy working habits, but we’ll get to that.
The Structure
When I became Executive producer, Riku became CEO and set the first “team of team” structure. Team of Teams refers to you going from having eight people, each with their respective responsibilities, to have about 25 - 30 people divided into teams with individuals collectively owning a subject. I can’t recall the composition at the time, but more or less;
- Marketing team, with 2-3 people.
- Investor & Startup team 2-3 people (general equivalent likely something like customer success)
- Event team 2 people + the extended team from Sun Effects (The physical product/event)
- Product team (the software platform)
- Sales & Partnerships (60% of revenue is b2b “corporate sales,” as opposed to ticket sales being b2c sales, owned by marketing and the investor & startup teams, respectively, for their customer segments)
Additionally, an operations team, including Riku as the CEO, visualized below the other teams. Not above. That is a very distinct design choice inherent to Nordic leadership styles, you are never above the org, you support the organization to serve the customer who at best is the CEO of the company. Another way to highlight this design principle was to have pictures of everyone on the wall, grouping them according to team, not according to rank.
Something Riku also brought to the team I was a part of that stuck with me as long as I was around was that a personality profiling exercise was done for the team at the beginning of the year. Once, at the beginning of every year, the core team made a personality profiling exercise to discuss how people were different. Not speaking in absolute terms but instead having a shared framework to say, “I’m extroverted according to this model, and it means this… hence, I like when others….”. A few other traditions stuck with the team from that time; when the new team started the year, the office was refurbished, and an offsite was organized to infuse team cohesion.
In 2016, Marianne Vikkula became CEO, and I became Vice-CEO. In the lack of this role in the American business culture and since it communicated something in terms of “less than,” I chose the title “President.” At the time, the team did not care about internal titles or rank as much as it cared about responsibilities and accountability within the organization. Outwards, you picked whatever title suited you to get the job done. The title President helped offload representative responsibilities from the CEO whenever an external stakeholder “needed prominence” to drive their agendas. “Our CEO is unavailable, but our President can attend”… you get the point.
The team design principles stayed, but a few additional things can be highlighted. Each team was always responsible for scaling their team, and each team lead made the recruitments for the lead roles under their team. This went through the entire scale of the organization. The CEO recruits the leads. The leads recruit the team. The team recruits the next level in the organization down the line. It breeds accountability for the people you recruit to an unprecedented level. There were accountability issues whenever a volunteer pool was allocated from a school or without this recruiting accountability. People not showing up or other problems significantly impacted operations beyond single-team issues. Exceptions existed among the ranks of the wider core team when certain positions with needed expertise were filled and the team lead needed help. The people team supported such a role at the beginning of the year. More exceptions like existed, but not to the extent it made this rule obsolete.
The Heart of the Slush team (way back when)
We did not have values as such defined, but at the first offsite of 2016, the marketing team (who later became the founding team of the marketing agency BOU, and who at the time of writing is now one of the fastest growing companies in Europe according to the FT 1000 rank listing) did an exercise creating the words that define Slush. Three words stood out from that exercise: Humble, Hardcore, and Humorous. Those were the values of that team at the time. If you're curious as to how to do this for your company and a more extensive culture documenting, Ex-Slush team member Julia Hämäläinen collaborated on a project using later experiences at Smartly.io (Finnish born, ad-tech company known for exceptional culture) as an example. You may wonder why the marketing team led the culture narrative endeavors at the time. It's not that weird if you read Spotify's Katariina Berg's work. She'll tell you that she collaborated with marketing on internal communication efforts in smaller companies she worked in early in her career.
Furthermore, when it came to principles, Marianne began outlining the strategy for each year by defining 5-7 key themes. Such as "Quality over Quantity". This particular one came when the event had grown to 25,000+ attendees, and the feedback was that the event felt like it needed to be more relevant with such mass attendance. The strategy came with a few ideas of goals for that years event in terms of audience sizes, budgets and new endeavors.
Additionally, the team had few policies or other working practices until we failed to create safety at the event, receiving copies of the amounts of harassment reported. The team developed a Code of Conduct, which we enforced for future safekeeping and conflict resolution. Agents were trained and deployed at future events.
The purpose definition was quite clear before I joined Miki (founder and former CEO of Slush), who ensured that it was on the office wall. At the time, it was "We help the next world-conquering founders forward." Additionally, Miki's team had done an exercise collaboratively creating a document within the team of the company's mission & vision statements and what it entails. That exercise was revisited once during 2016-2017, with one document that got iterated by the team with anyone interested in joining the exercise.
The Beat of the Slush team (way back when)
Every week started with a weekly update from each team. The update included the items that the team had on the agenda for the week. At the time, the team was 50+ people, and the team usually represented the team's leads in this forum. Everyone was always standing up, and the meeting took a maximum of 20 minutes. The good part about this weekly kick-off was that almost everyone from the extended core team was present at the office, so people usually got together and discussed the help they needed from others straight after hearing conflicting or collaborative needs from the other teams. Our challenge then was getting updates from the Singapore, Shanghai, and Tokyo teams; we probably never got that to work correctly.
The second meeting structure was the by-weeklies. They were held on Wednesday every other week, consisting of three rotating topics:
1. Goals - The goals of each team and their status. I can’t recall whether the structure was OKRs, but for the sake of “The Hustle,” this was irrelevant. Furthermore, each team had goals for the team, but each individual only had activities.
2. Finances & Budget - Latest PnL statement.
3. Retro - In stop/start/continue format about ways of working of the organization as a whole. Retro here refers to retrospectives from the agile methodologies framework.
The structure meant that the organization discussed each topic every six weeks. What made the practice unique was that every team needed to have their internal team meeting on the same subject before each meeting, usually on a Tuesday, and choosing one team member to represent the team at the by-weekly on those matters. The representative had to bring the input from their team to that forum and report back to their team.
The practice broke the hierarchy in that we never expected only the leaders of each respective team to be present in the by-weekly. The forum was open for whomever wanted to join, but everyone knew it didn’t make sense for everyone to be there. Sometimes thought, especially for the budgeting meeting most of the team showed up as there was a fight over what to keep and what to cut.
We also had Friday learnings, and people would come together at the end of the week to share what they had learned. This practice was more favored in the spring (the event was in Nov-Dec), and during that time of the year, the Monday updates sometimes were just Slack pings as the team was busy traveling, and there wasn’t a need to collaborate across teams.
The board meeting was the only forum that was off-limits to the entire team. However, Marianne always asked the team if they wanted answers from the board and the agenda, and as the CEO, she shared the notes retrospectively. There rarely was any red tape anywhere. We usually made it a point to discuss every business matter fully and openly, even when we disagreed, to show transparency of issues. The boardmeetings held around 4-6 times a year, was merely checkups, but during my time ideas that originated from the team, that came up to board level for signing off were rarily not implemented.
Whenever we encountered HR-related issues, we handled them directly with the people they were concerned about and not in some shared forum. The practice of jointly covering HR matters in a "Leadership" forum is something I've never understood in the companies I've joined after my experience of having to help design the system myself. HR issues belong to the people they handled with a maximum of 3-4 people, including the source of the problem, their manager and someone handling the company's HR, or a senior leadership member. Having these discussions in leadership team meetings is usually a sign of insecurity of leadership team members and bad operative design.
Furthermore, we had all metrics always available and displayed to the team. The ticket sales, the core revenue metric for the organization, were on the screen in the office. Customer satisfaction analysis was made on a yearly basis and integrated into next years plans. What we failed at during our years, in addition to initially preventing the harassment issues, was not having adequate people metrics, as we had people experiencing significant health issue due to stress and overworking. Riku had brought a practice of using Officewibe as a tool, but I assume the issue of the tool it was in email and data was scarce. Today, you have tools like Teamspective, that bring the quistionairs into slack, making it really easy to answer survey’s, as well as gaining actionable insights.
The Hustle of The Slush Team (way back when)
We already covered some goal-setting practices, but a few things had to have been said about the hustle back then.
Whenever someone asked for advice, you aimed to push back by saying, “We help the next generation of founders forward.” What do you think we should do? They reflected when a suggestion was coached out of the people: that suggestion was followed. Something thought by Miki.
If someone had a suggestion for doing something, the budget for doing things was always zero. You had to figure out how to find the money for it and who would buy it. Something every Slush CFO embodied to almost a fault.
We aimed for the impossible. If someone told the team, “It’s impossible,” it just had to be done. The team never limited itself to anything but the law and the laws of physics, and both usually were pressed pretty hard before giving up on the idea.
What came out of all this? If nothing else, a bunch a great memories.
DEIB-Learnings
I read ”why I no longer talk to white people about race” Thoughts:
The book aims to highlight the issues rather than to offer solutions. The actions are listed on one page. An appendix for only that would've significantly helped the book's cause. The only action I picked up was that, as a white person, I should talk with other white people that these problems are real.
As a white person, I'm here enduring the pain by educating myself and working among some of the leading practitioners in the field.
White feminism is given a considerable portion of the book. Individuals who think they are doing the right thing feel attacked when called for the injustice of their biases.
How much are you forgiven for doing bad things by just being white? A lot, according to statistics.
The most significant learning is how bad it is in the UK, and it needs to give more media attention globally than the stuff in us. The rest is just practicing being uncomfortable.
Furthmore, I’m reading The Art of Active Allyship and I’ve covered as much as the fact getting people. Active Alleyship deems getting a persons name right is an important gesture.
People have been getting my name wrong since I can remember. Even my dad once asked me to go out with my dog ”chico” and said please go out with the dog ”Chicolas”.
I mainly always have found it funny when people get my name wrong, or I feel sorry for the person looking a bit stupid in the moment. Its a hard name, I don’t look like the name that is given to me, nor does my nickname.
That’s why I haven’t understood why others get so upset when I get theirs wrong. Now I do, because they’ve also likely been discriminated due to others reasons, which I think I’ve rarely been. At least in adult life.
Reflecting on these learnings and my storytelling about Slush. I remember thinking about how big this gender issue is. Our extended core team at the time was precisely 50/50 split among genders and included people from different backgrounds and sexualities, and we weren't ever actively trying at that point. However, that was my white cisgender heterosexual male privileged biased thinking at the time.
Former colleagues Heidi Kähkönen, Emma Lehikoinen and Jessica Bliechenberg would give me a stark look right now, and Katja Toropainen, Nasim Selmani, and Julia Hämäläinen, who ended up being part of creating DEI consultancies would be lecturing me about all the ways that team still wasn't diverse as it could be. The fact shows that there is still work to be done by us.
Finally, I’ve been called out of having a horn bias against CEOs and my senior leaders. Usually resulting in some harsh feedback to those who are senior to me. I’ve reflected that it has to do with two things;
I received much more responsibility at a young age than ever, but I won’t go into those personal details.
I’ve spent a significant amount of time studying leadership and coaching leaders. If I sense insecurity, combined with tackling confrontation with excuses (as opposed to carrying the responsibility), everything the leader does will trigger a horns effect in me. Leadership is not a thing. It’s a feeling created in others. When I spot that feeling is not created in me, or the people the leader should be leading I do not hesitate to point it out. Sometimes, as is the nature of feelings, the reason of why that is hard to define. Hence, the reciever may feel frustrated as they do not understand what to do differently, and I’ll get frustrated because they don’t get what is happening.
Deidei’s New E-learning and Webpage
The webpage is, of course, created by none other than the previously mentioned BOU. Who constantly keep creating stellar work. Furthermore, Deidei has worked hard to release its DEI Fundamentals course, the first of four learning courses you can take to support your company's dei-journey.
And request a demo by submitting the form at the end.
I've yet to complete the content, but I'll get to it in the coming weeks and share more about what I've learned.
Until next week! Remember to subscribe for more thoughts every Sunday and get access to an exclusive community of daily “Just Thoughts”!
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