Brett Hurt On Building Culture

Brett Hurt, Founder & Former CEO Bazaarvoice and Founder of Coremetrics

Brett Hurt is the Founder and former Chief Executive Officer and President of Bazaarvoice. He founded the Bazaarvoice in 2005 and left the company as CEO and President in November 2012. Bazaarvoice is a Lead Edge Capital portfolio company. Brett is a seasoned CEO and has been pioneering e-commerce innovations since 1998 and online communities since 1982. Brett founded Coremetrics in February 1999 after spending 10 years developing Internet-based software. Brett helped grow Coremetrics into the leading marketing analytics solution for e-commerce, and Forrester Research rated Coremetrics #1 in the industry. He is currently the Chairman of the Board of Edgecase.io, a product decision platform that provides tools to help shoppers simplify online research and make informed decisions.

Summary notes on Building Culture

• General Tips

• Make it a focus to build company culture

• Did a lot of homework to develop company culture

• Netflix culture document, visits to Zappos, Container Store, etc.

• Carve out times to discuss ways to improve culture during company offsites

• How often did you meet to discuss culture?

• Met every three months to discuss culture at company offsites

• Regularly surveyed employees about culture

• Held random group coffee meetings

• What are some pitfalls when a company is building culture?

• A general pitfall is simply not focusing on culture

• Not ideal if a CEO delegates building culture to someone else

• What are best practices for scaling and maintaining culture?

• Scaling culture is challenging when opening new offices, was key to rotate individual ‘culture-holders’ to hire regional teams