Why building meaningful values into your brand leads to the culture you want
Creating and sustaining culture can feel a little bit like a chicken and egg situation in a startup. You need to define your culture early on in order to attract the right employees, but culture itself is largely driven by people, so until you have the people in place, how can your culture be expected to flourish?
A company formed a decade ago in 2009, Deciwatt is older than you’d imagine most startups to be. Created off the back of a brief from Solaraid with therefore, a London-based product design consultancy, Deciwatt’s first product GravityLight was an answer to this problem: develop an extremely low-cost solar light for $5, a sustainable alternative to the dangerous and expensive kerosene lamp depended on by millions as a source of light.
When Mikela Druckman, Marco Paladini, and Nikola Sivacki founded Greyparrot in January 2019, the three founders set out to utilise their computer vision and Augmented Reality (AR) experience in the B2C sector and translate it into the B2B industry with the mission of creating a positive social impact.
The Victoria Embankment in central London might not be the obvious place to find out more about Scotland’s vibrant startup scene. However, representatives from the country’s board of trade, business incubators, educators, R&D partnerships and innovation centres headed south for London Tech Week, and Scotland House, where they spent the evening showcasing the business opportunities north of the border, creativity, the potential of data science and the country’s talent.
For founders looking to start a business it is imperative to get the culture right – as getting it wrong can lead to bad investor, customer and employee experience. At Women of Silicon Roundabout ‘Founder Focus’ workshop track, CEO and co-Founder of London-based foodtech startup Feedr, Riya Grover delivered a thought-provoking workshop titled ‘Defining your culture blueprint to hyper-charge growth’, and explained why it is so important to get it right from the start.
At the LeadersIn Tech Summit during London Tech Week 2019, a roundtable was held discussing the benefits and drawbacks of partnerships between corporates and startups. At the table, Anna Jones from FieldHouse Associates, Ryan Haynes from Ryan Haynes Marketing, Ben Rudman the CEO of MMT Digital, and Denise Glee from MagnaCarta Communications, lent their personal expertise to the debate.













