Building an Integrity Culture: Co-Founder Conversations

In this conversation, I sit down with Huddle Co-Founders Stephanie Golik and Michael Saloio. Huddle is a platform for designers and builders to invest in startups with their time.  Stephanie has spent her career building alongside founders at studios and leading design and product at fast-growing tech companies. She was an early design leader at Cruise, building user experiences for self-driving cars. Before that, Steph was Head of Product at Mapfit (acq. by Foursquare). She's a proud Cuban-American born, raised and currently residing in Miami. Michael is a product and team-focused entrepreneur and investor. He’s spent his career working with technology executives and investors. As an investment analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., he followed some of the biggest names in technology including Cisco, EMC, and Apple. Prior to Oppenheimer, Mike covered special situations at Sidoti & Co. Over the past five years, Michael reimagined his career to focus on early-stage businesses. He was the first employee at SuperPhone, a messaging application backed by Ben Horowitz, Betaworks, Bessemer, and more. Since 2014 he has consulted with, invested in, or advised more than 35 startups that have raised more than $200M in venture financing. I met Michael years ago and have tracked his rise…when I saw that his latest venture raised 3.3M and was a co-founded company, I reconnected to include him in my co-founder conversations series. My question throughout this series has been simple - what does it take to build and sustain a powerful co-founder relationship?  Michael and Stephanie shared some of the insights and principles that helped them do exactly that. The biggest aha was the umbrella concept of an Integrity Culture, and how many powerful values fall into place with a focus on Integrity. As Michael points out, it’s not just “I do what I say I will” it's also about a culture of Coaching and Feedback to help everyone right-size their commitments and to give themselves (and others) feedback along the way when they find themselves falling short. Stephanie and Michael share a conversation format that they use over the course of each week to keep their team on track and in integrity! Integrity Culture also implicates one of my favorite words: Interoception, a concept I learned from Food Coach Alissa Rumsey. Michael and Stephanie’s vision of an integrity culture is one where you commit to a thing because you are intrinsically motivated to do it, not through force or pressure…you self-select the thing you are going to do. And that means you know what you want! Interoception is the ability to feel and know your inner state.  Some additional keys to a powerful co-founder relationship that line up with the other conversations in this series are the ability to have Healthy Conflict (rather than an unhealthy “peace”) and the regular asking and giving of generous and generative deep feedback. One other insight that was fresh for me in this conversation was Michael’s idea of a good co-founder relationship as one that is “Energy Producing” vs. energy sucking. A powerful co-founder relationship is like a flywheel - the more energy you invest into it, the more energy it throws off. Be sure to check out my other co-founder conversations, like this episode with Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, co-founders of Userlist, on how they connected through shared communities and learned how each other really worked through real-world, previous projects. You may also enjoy my interview with Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman, the co-authors of the 2015 bestseller, Wired to Create, where we unpack how they managed their working relationship. And if you really want to dive deep into the idea of being a conscious co-founder, make sure to check out my conversation with my friend Doug Erwin, the Senior Vice President of Entrepreneurial Development at EDAWN, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada. Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes  and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders. Links Huddle website