Hopper’s culture underpins the way our company operates day-to-day, and what has enabled us to scale to the 3rd largest OTA in North America. Read on to understand how Hopper’s culture was designed, how it functions, and how it contributes to our overall success.
A company will develop a culture one way or another, regardless if it was consciously built or formed naturally on its own. When a culture is formed on its own, we might not like what we get. We think deeply about our culture at Hopper because getting it right will make the company much more robust and efficient.
We deliberately designed our culture not only to build a better company, but to enable faster growth. Our leadership principles and processes were built with the goal of gaining a long-term, competitive advantage.
For the foreseeable future, we will be adding more people into the company at an unbelievable rate. Human beings need time to adapt to new environments, to learn how to work with new people, to build trust and to communicate effectively. In most environments, this team cohesion can take many months or even years to form. Hopper is growing so quickly that we face a unique problem: at any given time there will be more people at the company that are new than people that are not. This implies that we can’t simply rely on the passage of time to integrate new employees into our culture. If we do not deliberately design processes to address this, we risk creating an environment of perpetual chaos and disjointed interactions between individuals.
We let the customers speak for themselves and measure the success of our products through data on customer behavior. We do not presuppose to have a crystal ball telling us what a customer needs or wants.
documented
At a certain stage of their development, most companies see the need to consign the values and vision of their founders so that new employees can understand and relate to them.
This process usually entails formally documenting principles and values that the leaders of the company personally believe are important to what the existing culture of the company is.
designed
At Hopper, we started by asking the question, “What culture would allow us to best serve our customers, and give us a competitive advantage, given the business we’re in?”
This is a fundamentally different approach, as it entails deliberate design of a company culture. We do this with the explicit intention of gaining a long-term, sustainable, competitive advantage. This approach is less common, but has been taken before by companies including Google, Netflix, Zappos, Pixar, Airbnb, Amazon. These are all companies that have deliberately designed their culture.
One way to think of a deliberately designed culture is as the operating system for the company. A computer’s operating system is commonly defined as “the software that supports a computer's basic functions, such as scheduling tasks, executing applications, and controlling peripherals.” This definition of culture goes way beyond a series of fluffy values and principles. It implies a system which is actively supporting the behavior of the individuals in the company. A strongly designed culture — just like a robust operating system — is a competitive advantage by way of increasing both the speed and scalability of the company.
Easier integration. By exposing how we expect people to make decisions and by defining a narrow set of outcomes, we can offer our new employees a much clearer path to success. This makes it faster and easier for new people to become productive contributors.
Homogenous decision making. By clearly defining how we expect our people to think and make decisions, we are able to push more autonomy down through the organization.
A deeper sense of belonging. Human beings are fundamentally tribal creatures. As such, we tend to form strong emotional bonds with groups that we identify with. A sharply defined culture attracts people that are already aligned with our values and helps our current employees identify with the company.
We did not build Hopper’s culture and processes from scratch. Instead, we based them on existing ideas that are used by other larger and very successful companies. The idea of building a company culture by importing components from elsewhere may seem strange: how could someone else’s culture be a good starting point for our company? Our goal at Hopper was not to grow what would naturally evolve in our company, but to deliberately design a system of principles and processes that would give us an unfair competitive advantage.
In the real world this process happens all the time when employees bid farewell to a larger company to found a startup. Expedia, Glassdoor, Zillow, Cranium, RealNetworks and Valve were all founded by ex-Microsoft employees. Flipboard, Linkedin, EA and Nest were founded by teams that had worked at Apple. In all of these cases, these founders brought many of the components of their former culture with them, and then evolved this culture to meet the particular needs of the new start-up.
Going back to the operating system analogy... building Hopper’s culture from existing models is equivalent to creating a new operating system by starting from an open-source codebase and extending it to meet some specific need or market. We gained two major advantages from this: first, we inherited a working set of principles and processes that have already been proven to scale. Because these ideas have been implemented elsewhere, we can get a sense of the advantages and drawbacks of each by studying the companies where they came from, and then decide if they are a good fit for the market we are trying to address. One could think of this as culture-market fit. When we adopt external principles, we get access to a large pool of talented individuals around the world that already understand the basics of this culture and know how to function within it, which in turn, gives us an unfair advantage in scaling the company.
From Amazon we borrow a blueprint for speed, innovation and of course customer centricity. These principles work well for us because, just like Amazon, we operate a low-margin business that sells commodity inventory. Many highly successful tech companies offer completely unique products or services that customers have no choice but to purchase from them. For example, Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, Uber and Airbnb dominate because they offer products or services that have no other real competitive equivalent in the market. Amazon has always been an outlier because, since its foundation, most of its revenue has come from selling products that are readily available in thousands of other websites and retail stores. Even today, the vast majority of Amazon’s inventory is widely available everywhere. Hopper is in a similar situation: all of the flights and hotels that we sell can be booked in thousands of other places, including directly from the companies that provide them to us. In a category where there is literally no advantage to be gained from inventory, we can only differentiate through product innovation and extreme customer centricity.
At Hopper, we believe in providing a strong definition of how we expect people to think and behave. This is a delicate business, as there is a fine line between telling people how to think and telling them what to think. Our goal is to structure the former as much as possible, so that we can afford to give individuals as much freedom as possible in the latter while maintaining a maximum of cohesion across the organization. Pushing decisions down into the company is the primary reason why we set up structures and controls, because decentralized decisions are the basis of true scalability.
A strong company culture is not built with fluffy value statements and posters. Culture starts with the founders of a company and extends down through the leadership. When new people join an organization, more than anything else, they look at the behavior of the leaders to understand what is expected of them and what will be rewarded. By focusing on building great leaders, we are building the entire company.
To do this we rely on our Leadership Principles. It’s important to keep in mind that these are not abstract values that we use a few times a year to align our strategy. We expect our leaders at Hopper to apply these principles on a daily basis, so they need to be more detailed and robust. These principles underpin everything we do at Hopper, including who we hire, what we value in decision making, and how we determine career advancement.
This is our process for implementing and growing our culture at Hopper:
Define it clearly at a behavioral level. When we talk about culture at Hopper we don’t focus on vague values and principles, but rather focus on how we expect our leaders and teams to behave. Our culture offers a clear set of rules for what will make someone successful at Hopper and ultimately how they can grow and advance in the organization.
Build it into everything that happens in the company. This is where processes and protocols come into play. At the most basic level, we will require that all company communications become centered around the pillars of our culture. For example, all presentations, requirements, etc. should always start with the customer’s perspective and needs.
Teach it to people. Learning the Hopper culture requires more than understanding core values and leadership principles. We expect our leaders to develop specific skills that will make them more effective. This implies that individuals are formally trained and will be expected to practice certain skills. For example: interviewing and hiring, writing narratives, and doing data analysis are all skills that need to be learned and honed over time.
Hire based on culture fit. Hiring for our culture and leadership principles basically means that we are looking for leaders that naturally fit the description of what Eric Schmidt defines as Smart Creatives. These are individuals who naturally present these abilities:
• A unique and creative perspective on problems
• Hands-on
• Focused on results
• Able to collaborate
• Use analytics to every advantage
Our interviews are designed to assess these predispositions and to see if a candidate is a natural fit with our Leadership Principles.
Reward behavior that is on culture. Performance reviews, compensation and advancement at Hopper are also based on our culture. We reward and promote individuals who demonstrate their ability to apply our Leadership Principles.
Review it regularly. Just like any good operating system, nothing in our culture is set in stone. We review and update our principles and processes regularly as our company and business continue to grow and evolve.
We intentionally designed our culture to give leaders ownership and autonomy, empowering them to make decisions based on a set of guiding principles and tenets to achieve maximum impact for the customer.Sounds like a fit? Check out our open roles!
