Stay hungry, my friend (by @asanwal)

 from his @cbinsights June, 6th newsletter

Being hungry means many things.
It is ambition, resourcefulness, scrappiness, having a get-isht-done attitude, etc.
It is very tied to humility as well, because it means realizing that no matter how many nice things people now say about us, we’re still 0.1% of the way towards what we could build.
Hunger hates complacency. It is allergic to hubris.
But as I look out at what our biggest challenges are, I realize:
It is not the size of the market. It is not some giant dinosaur company waking up and actually getting a clue. It is us waking up and thinking our isht don’t stink.
When you’re in tiny offices where a neighboring tenant poos on the floor in the bathroom (true story), or where you have office mice (also true), or where a $5K deal is the highlight of your month (also true), hunger is part of the DNA of the team.
Only a certain type of masochist joins a company at that stage and enjoys it enough to stay.
But as you grow, things change:
-The offices get a bit nicer
-There actually is a pantry
-There are some perks
This is, of course, natural and expected to some extent.
But insurgents have the advantages of speed and responsiveness to customers, and IMO maintaining hunger is key to these.
So this is our other challenge. How do we maintain hunger even in the face of the modest perceived success we’ve had?
I don’t know the answer.
I imagine having new people join and work out of an office with mice and poo on the bathroom floor for the first month probably wouldn’t be a good look :) 

If you know any good examples of companies that have maintained that hunger as they’ve scaled, would love to hear more. If any really good ideas or examples emerge from among the responses, we’ll roll them up and share back with everyone.

Maintaining culture as you scale
Last week, I shared an earlier post titled 54 mistakes of a startup CEO that was written when CB Insights was under 25 people.
That newsletter talked about some of the communication challenges that have cropped up as the result of our growth (we’re now nearly 200).
The other challenge I talked about was maintaining culture, which I wanted to cover today.
First, defining culture. We’ve defined the culture of CBI through the lens of the people we aim to have on the team.
We describe successful people at CB Insights as having the 4 H’s. They are:
-Humble
-Hungry
-Happy
-Helpful
Most of the above are obvious. Happy is probably the one that requires some explaining. It doesn’t mean walking around all day with a smile on your face.
It does mean an orientation towards solutions. A “yes, if…” mentality vs a “no, because…” disposition. It’s people who favor creation over criticism. 

When I worry about maintaining culture, however, the H that I worry about the most is hunger.