Behind The Culture Deck (Live From Accel Connect: People Summit 2025)

0:00It's new. It's scary. Oh my God. You know, we're going to ruin this next generation of people again. Man, it'll take our jobs. Yeah.

0:14What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:50I'm going to jump right into why don't you guys tell us about yourself. So Patty, obviously, claim to fame, Netflix, but you had a life before that. And I have a life after it. You do, right? I've been gone a long time now. It's funny. I know that one of your questions is what's not on Wikipedia. And I haven't looked at myself on Wikipedia recently. And it's like it's as if I was born, met Reed, started at Netflix, died. And then Jessica and I got back together, and it's all been nothing since then. I started out my career as a recruiter like Jess. uh and i'm sorry oh no it's it's a great job it was at the time that i started doing it we were kind of the uh we were the whores of hr right like it's like oh you're you're a headhunter you're a recruiter you're not really in hr so i started in pretty big companies the first company i worked at in tech was seagate because i live in santa cruz and it was hundred and something 200 ,000 people globally.

2:02Then I went to Sun Microsystems and it was about 100 ,000 people, but Sun was technically pretty small back then. And it was really cool because there I got to work on really high powered computers. And after that, I went to a smaller company that was a software company in Scotts Valley. I live in Santa Cruz and it was Borland, which made like Microsoft tool, but I remember the first day. So I'm last hired. So my cubicle is in front of the men's room. And I had a, those of you, nobody's old enough to remember. I had a 386 standalone computer on my desk. And I said to somebody, Hey, can you send me that in soft copy?

2:46And they said, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, like, could you send me a file? And they said, Oh yeah, I'll be right over. And they handed me a floppy disk. I was like, hey, thanks. I just didn't know what to do with it. So that company kind of imploded. And one of the VPs that I worked with went, his choice was to either teach at Harvard or go to a startup. And he went to this startup because he really liked the founder. So he went to this company with Reed. And I called him about something and I said how's your new HR person he's like they're an idiot we fired them I'm like well you should hire me uh he said I won't because I told the CEO of Borland I would never you told me if I stole anybody from the company you'd kill me you'd break both my legs I said no I didn't anyway so I I I called Reed back and said you should know me and that's how I met Reed so that was that was at a company before Netflix it was called Pure Software right it's a software tools company and then we uh he made a bunch of money and invested a bunch of startups and uh i was consulting and then he called me and said i'm gonna go work at this little company called netflix and i said and he said uh i want you to come too and i said absolutely not that's the dumbest idea i've ever heard in my life and here you are all right Jessica also started as a recruiter.

4:14I did. I started out as a headhunter. But I was going to be an artist. That was the plan. And I wanted to be a painter. And I'd gone to art school in New York. And my dad said I'd never make any money. Dads are great like that. Yeah. And he was right. It was really hard to make money as an artist. But then I moved to San Francisco. And I was working in an art gallery. and somehow, long story short, got promoted to manage the art gallery. As manager, I had to sell the art and I became the top salesperson out of all five galleries. So you were making money in art. I was. Up yours, Dad. But not my art.

4:52The owner of the gallery was an interesting man and created quite a toxic work environment. And so I ended up deciding to leave. And I applied because I was good at sales. I applied to this entry-level sales job and I was headhunting. and I ended up being very good at it. And that's how I met Patty and Netflix because they used me as a hunter and they asked me to come in and run recruiting and I said no a bunch because that's not what I did. And I wasn't, you know, I wasn't recruiting more like Patty. And I was a business person. So I said no a bunch, but then I ended up saying yes. And the reason why I said yes was because they thought about things so uniquely compared to all my other clients.

5:38They got the talent, was the most important thing that we did. They didn't worry about the silly stuff. And they were the smartest people. And we called her at midnight in Barcelona. Well, you did pay me well, which was nice. But it was worth it. That's right. Good recruiting practices, yeah. You know, but to play on that a little bit, But I think part of the reason that allowed us to be the people people, we turned out to be, we were just making fun of people people because our names are always ridiculous. Anyway, when you're a recruiter, and especially if you're good like Jessica was, where people will keep, you keep following them, or you're internal like I was, where you live with the people that you hire, you really do get the whole talent part, right?

6:29I mean, it really is about finding the right person. And the other thing that Jessica and I have talked about a ton between us is part of the reason I think we were both really good recruiters is because we just really love what people do. Like, you know, I did a talk like this with like 600. It was at Glassdoor. Somebody here is from Glassdoor. And it was 600 recruiters in the room or something. I said, how many of you guys, you know, hire engineers, software engineers, 600 hands went up. And I'm like, how many of you have sat next to an engineer while they write code? And nobody, I mean, literally nobody had.

7:06And I mean, that's the part I loved. That's the part we both love. And I mean, we'd be like, how'd you do that? Show me how you did that, right? And I didn't still understand. But I mean, but when you look at like what people do and they put their passion around, I just get so much joy out of learning from other people and seeing other people do things that we all thought were going to be impossible. Yeah. Well, and I guess kind of jumping to the Netflix story. So the culture deck, everyone's heard of it. I wrote it personally. I had a dream one night and I woke up and I wrote. The vision. Yeah, the vision, right.

7:44We rewrote our values six times in the time I was there. Reed said to me, let's have an offsite with all the executive team and write our values. I'm like, let's not. How about if we create a product that somebody will buy first? Just crazy. Call me crazy. And I didn't want to do it. it just seems so esoteric. I'm like, we're just going to waste a whole day, you know, wordsmithing some value statements. I said, but what if we wrote down what we want people to actually do? What if we wrote down behaviors instead of esoteric aspirational values? You know, one of the things we wrote down, we wordsmith, but it was really like, we don't really want stupid people was kind of, Reed and I talked about that.

8:25And I'm like, you know, that's not really not going to fly. And then we changed it to like intelligence. And then over time we realized that it wasn't IQ, it was EQ too. And so when we wrote it as behaviors, it gave us a script to give to new employees and say, here's what you can expect from us. And to each other as leaders, like this is what we expect from each other. The document took us 10 years to write. Years. Okay. And we wrote it. If you ever go back and look at the original PowerPoint presentation, every chapter is built on the chapter before. So we couldn't have freedom and responsibility unless we had a high talent density, which was the high performance part, right?

9:12We couldn't rethink compensation unless we rethought everything else. We couldn't say it's like a sports team unless we actually treated it like a sports team. And so Reid and I would usually brainstorm. We'd go through with a couple of other execs, then we'd go through with our management team, then we'd go through with the rest of the company. And I remember a VP one time saying to me, at one point I had said, you know, it's perfectly okay to interview with other people. In fact, we encourage you to do that. And one of our VPs said, well, I don't think you guys realize that if you force all the employees to interview somewhere else, nobody will be working.

9:46And I'm like, you know, call me crazy, but I've been walking through the building and people appear to be working. And by the way, we didn't make anybody do it. It's a PowerPoint document. Like, do you hate the idea or do you hate the way it's worded? Because I think you hate the idea, right? You think it's disloyal. Oh, no, no, I'm totally on board. And I said, great, just send me what you want it to say and we'll check. I mean, it's a PowerPoint document. But the point for you guys all to know is that no one person ever wrote that. I said to Reed one time, like, how many hours do you think you and I spent on that?

10:23He's like, us? Yeah. Like it's thousands if you consider everybody that's put in. And you guys did it after I left. Yeah, multiple times. Multiple times. Was there a plan to publish it? Or you said it took 10 years and then, I mean, it came out. The plan was this. The plan was this, that Rita and I at our company before had screwed everything up so badly that it was, I was like, when he called me in the middle of the night, I'm like, give me one good reason I should go do another startup with you, which is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. dvds in the mail right and he said what if we created the company we always wanted to work at i was like oh now i'm awake um and that's and so we felt like we had to write it down we felt like if we didn't write it down we wouldn't hold each other accountable and at that point i had been so software engineer in my brain it was like well you got to document your code if this is the code we're going to live by.

11:26Yeah, but I think when we published it, which this was my mistake, Reid was like, the idea was we wanted, we didn't know it would go viral, but we wanted it to weed the people we didn't want out. Yeah, no, no, it's true. Reid says to me in the car, we're carpooling on the way into work, hey, I met this woman last night who has this really cool company. It's called SlideShare, and they're putting PowerPoint presentations online. I'm like, God damn it, that's a good idea. I wish I had thought of that. I wonder what people are going to put out. He's like, well, I put out the deck yesterday. No, he made me put it out.

12:01Yeah. Oh, that's right. That's right. Under my email. Super awesome. Yeah, right. And then we were like, I'm like, oh my God, you're going to scare away all our candidates because it was pretty, the original document was pretty edgy. Average performance in a seven package. Yeah, that's right. And he said, only the ones we don't want. Yeah. But it was actually very good because we did that in the interviewing process. Like, everybody had to read it. And there were people that would drop out. They're like, no, no, no. That's too unsafe. That's bad. Yeah, yeah. Or they didn't read it. So they know stupid people and they're like, oh, I'm out.

12:36Right. Or they were like, you know what it said? It allowed us to have, and for those of you that have spent time on documents like this, it allows you to have conversations about the stuff. the last panel talked a lot about interviewing, about the stuff you really want to know. You really want to know what kind of boss makes you crazy. You really want to know if having sole ownership of what you produce is okay with you. Because most of us are brought up or come up through the ranks going, oh, my boss told me. Right? I mean, we just didn't tolerate that stuff. And so it allowed us to interview for really different skill sets other than just technical.

13:20And it was our code. I mean, it was how we worked, was how we made decisions is how we got alignment. It was, you know, how we decided who was in charge. I mean, it was our operating model. And, you know, for us, we were obsessed with operational excellence. It's like we, you If we were consensus, if we were too slow, if we were dragging our feet, competition would beat us. And at the end of the day, I mean, it was part of why we won. Yeah, and like somebody said, when do you change it? We were talking about that earlier. So first of all, we talked about culture a lot. We talked about it as much as we talked about probably anything else.

14:04It made some of our executives crazy. Our first CFO is like, oh, my God, are we going to do another? I'm sorry about culture. I'm like, yeah, because you're bordering on asshole, moving from intolerant to jerk here. But what we would do is, for example, we'd take those behavioral values and we would say, integrity and honesty. Jessica, somebody on your team that's demonstrated that in the last week, give us this example. And if you couldn't and nobody else could, we would say, is that still important? Important? Is it still real? If we think it's important, but it's not real, then what in the system makes that so?

14:49And so it was kind of a test for us forever. But I think that that's a very good point that I want people to hear is that we spent just as much time, if not more, on how we worked together as we did the business. And I think companies that are willing to do that, you have a much greater chance at these things actually codifying and becoming real. because you all know it's important and you make a decision together as a team that you're going to do this and then you walk out of the room and you start doing it. We did that all the time. One asset that we did have is that Reid was the first one to walk out of the room and start doing it.

15:37We said, okay, we're not being great at being a feedback culture. Then in every meeting you had with him... Then he would walk out of the room and meet with all of your employees. Yeah, and say, give me feedback. But I mean, it's a better problem to have than not. And then the next day he would come in and say, guess what they said about you. So the other thing that I heard the last panel talk about is scaling. I want to just make a comment about that and about the CEO approving every interview. I interviewed everybody as a final interview until I couldn't do it anymore. Then it was me. And then it was you.

16:12No, but then we started realizing that our job was not to run it up, but was to create. Like when I left the company, there were people who were like, when you leave, it'll all be over. The culture you created will be gone without you. It'll be nothing. I'm like, that is completely not true because there are disciples all over this company and they don't need me. And we learned to be able to say, particularly a new manager would come in and say, how do I think about getting rid of somebody? I need HR. Hi, you're HR. I'd like to do some team building. And I would say, great. That's why we hired you.

16:56Go build a team. You may want to talk to a recruiter. I'm like, you want to do trust falls? I don't think so. But often what we would do is say, talk to John. He's really good at that. He's had a similar situation when he started here. Talk to him about it. Talk to Susan because she's hired a lot of people that she wished she had and then talk to her about what she learned about that. So creating those leaders, demonstrating, creating, demonstrating, creating, that's how it scales. That's how it scales. You can't keep going. And for one thing, if you keep going to the top, then your CEO gets so weird because they have those weird skip level interviews with somebody and they come back and go, it's all falling apart.

17:50It's like, no, we had a bad day. And they have those. They do. I guess, I mean, it's interesting that as you publish it, it becomes so viral, right? And then you probably look at it and say, again, this is the culture we built. These are like common sense, you know, and maybe not common practice. I think somebody said that on one of your podcasts. But just why do you think, honestly, it was so unique and even from an HR perspective? Because it was common sense. And because so many of our team, when I was there, were technical. And, you know, you guys work with software engineers. It's good or bad.

18:32It's right or wrong. It's black or white. It's very binary. Yeah, it's completely zero or one. It's digital, right? And so being straightforward was, you know, I could say to them, they'd say, what's our policy on this? And I would say, I don't know, you seem to be an intelligent person. What do you think we should do in this situation? Do I look like your mother, right? Right. What would you do in this situation? And so when I wrote my book, I wrote my book because after I left Netflix, I consulted with lots and lots of startups. I did Warby Parker and Peloton and a bunch of little companies when they were little, little, little, little.

19:17And they would slap the culture deck on the table and say, we want to do this. And I would say, well, It took us 10 years. You want to get started? And we didn't mean it as a Bible. We meant it as an onboarding document as much as anything else. This is what you can expect from us. So when I wrote the book, I wrote it as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Netflix Culture Deck. Like, how do you really operationalize it? And that was our job as CHROs. Our job was to operationalize those things. Yeah. Make it a product. Not to do HR. Yeah. Not to do HR. And I think that's the other thing is like, I think, um, companies get really confused and make things a lot more complicated than they need to be.

20:08And we were more practical and I think clarity was King. It's like, if people understand the deal and they, you know, and they understand expectations. They know what we expect. Like, that's like half the battle. And I go to these companies that I advise now. And if you go down a few layers, you get like, you ask like, oh, what are the three most important things for the company? And you get totally different answers from the new, or they don't know. And, And so I think we were just very good at simplifying and getting down to what was most important and being very clear on how to get there. Yeah, the other thing I've learned from the years I've spent outside of Netflix and talking to groups like yours, and I didn't realize it when I was doing it, right?

21:03I mean, so hindsight's 20-20. here's the most important thing you can do if you're a chro or people leader in your company throw shit away if it if you're doing something because you've always doing it or because everybody else is doing it and you can't go up to your geekiest engineer and explain why in one sentence stop right because and i learned that i i used to say i was the product manager for people, right? So, you know, there's a whole chapter in my book. Let's say we think performance feedback is a good idea. It might result in better performance. Most of us think that. I know, I always say, like, I know, I'll go into a meeting at Netflix and go on the whiteboard and go, I got an idea, I got an idea.

21:54Okay, once a year in writing, we're going to look back over the entire last year and tell you something you probably could have done better that we didn't tell you then because we were saving it for your annual performance review and you kept doing it and it was really bad and we'd like you to not do that again. And then we would take all that feedback and we'd decide what to pay you next year. Right? And the people in the room would be like, well, that's a stupid idea. Now, to be fair, I still haven't gotten the performance review part right but at least i knew that wasn't the best idea yeah no it's a well anyways we can go down a rat hole but it's a good it's a good example of like like that's sacrosanct i mean right doesn't there is a good hr person supposed to well i know and it's i don't know i get so emotional about these things but you know i was just talking to a ceo the other day and they just did their performance review and he's like, oh, it told me like 85 % of the company is high performing.

22:58He's like, I just know that's not true. I was like, there's no way it's true. So I think that there's a lot of well meaning, well intended things that we are doing, but, and we're moving so fast and there's all the reactive work that comes with what we do with the org changes and the terminations. And, and then you're trying to be strategic and run these projects and then you have everybody in the company that thinks that they understand how to do your job better than you. And, but I think we just, I don't know, I think that there's that time for reflection and thinking about the things that are actually going to move the needle.

23:35And, and I always thought about it as like, my job was to be the chief effectiveness officer. It's like, how do I make the company more effective? And if these things are not, then they got to go. Yeah. And, and exactly. I love you. I love you. And half of that work is just getting shit out of the way, right? Like my CFO, we go public. I just emailed you the approval plan for approving money for people, individual contributors. And the maximum is$5 ,000. And then it has to have somebody in finance to approve it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Because everybody's got one of those approval processes.

24:22Is it in the budget or isn't it in the budget? Right. And I'm thinking, oh, yeah, I want that half a million dollar Ph.D. mathematician that I just hired to spend some of her brainpower figuring out how to fuck with the finance people. because that's what they're going to do. They're going to say they're going to put in three invoices for$4 ,999 to get around it. It's like, no. But that's an example. It took five years to replace the people in finance whose job it was to approve. By the way, their power comes from saying no. Right. Right. So they don't go home and go, yeah, that engineer came in.

25:08I said, go ahead. And they're like, that guy came in. I told them$5 ,000 was a mark and you're not going against it, right? But it took five years to replace those people with people who could sit in on the staff meetings with the engineering team and say, hey, by the way, we budgeted for$5 ,000 a person. Our run rate is$7 ,500. What did we not anticipate? Do we really want to make it different? How do we want to think about that? Yeah, they were the strategic partner, not the no person. Not the no person. But now we're mucking around in finance. Right? Is that an HR job? It's an effectiveness job.

25:48Yeah. Yeah. So at what point in a company's growth or life cycle does it all just go sideways and everybody forgets it running a business? Every day. Every day. Come on. Like, you know, I always still, you probably get this all the time too. We still get on our podcast, like, who's an example of somebody that's doing it right? Oh, when the pandemic happened, Patty, who do you think has the best practices on working from home? Like, fucking nobody. Nobody. We're all making it up. Who's really figured out the future of work? The wizard that has the thing? We were just whispering in the background like, AI, AI, AI.

26:33What about when we lived? Monorail, monorail, monorail. Yeah. Run rate. Cloud. It's all about the cloud. No. Data science. Data science. Data science. We don't know. I just did a podcast with somebody else about, you know, AI. I'm like, oh, get over it. It's going to be fine. Yeah. Show out. It's new. It's scary. Oh, my God. We're going to ruin this next generation of people again. We'll take our jobs. I mean, when we're all plugged into the matrix, we won't notice. We are not sticking to your questions, are we? Oh, I don't have any really. I don't think Peter expected us to. I mean, he knew what he was getting into.

27:15I really have nothing. This was ChatGPT. I just came up with random things. I'm utilizing AI. That's good. We're wild and honest. Yeah, but no, I mean, I think your answer, our answer really matters to you. You're never going to figure it out. And I'm telling you from my experience, as soon as that day you walk in and go, figured that one out, you're wrong again. Right? Because now, so here's the other thing that happens when you scale. When you scale, okay, the first problems of a startup are problems of difficulty. right and so how you solve problems of difficulty is you hire the smartest people that you can afford to hire and you work hard right because solving those problems is like and the whiteboard if you don't use whiteboards the slack channels are not full of like there's the answer it's like not that not that because you're in that you are literally inventing something new that's the whole point yeah right so nobody knows the right answer because you're making shit up right and and And then if you get to problems of scale, your first problems are, you know, difficulty.

28:28Now you're at problems of scale and breadth. Now it's kind of helpful to have a couple of people around that have seen 100x. You know, because I think that people can imagine maybe 10, but 50, but 100. And then you've got to reprogram those people because they tend to come from larger, more established companies that have a lot more rules and process. And what we found, I mean, was that those people read the culture deck like, oh, I have died. I want to be here. I want to be here. I want to be here. And they're the same ones that would walk into our offices and go, let's do trust falls. Yeah. Well, yeah.

29:10And I mean, you know, I think the deprogramming was really hard. The hard part. It was hard, but it was really important because we also, because we were making it up as we go along, we didn't hire a lot of junior people because they hadn't seen 10x where we were. And so we hired pretty senior people and, you know, they came with 10 to 15 years of experience and at Microsoft, at Google, at wherever. And this was such a foreign place because we really were asking them to like be an entrepreneur and make decisions and run teams and not have rules. And, you know, they just that's all they knew. Right.

29:54So it wasn't that it was bad, but we just had to teach them differently. Like, okay, yeah, like you get to actually make the decision on budget. Or like we were whispering, we were shispering. You probably heard us. Shispring's my word. We can't help it. Like talking shit and whisper. Like, what were we shispering about? Which part? Train of thought. Oh, about who makes the decisions about recruiting. And I was saying, yeah, the problem, we were talking about the hot stove. Yeah. It's like particularly with new managers, you know, you can still be in the interview loop. And I could say they say, you love that guy, Patty.