Building Research Technology Culture: Why Mistakes Should Be Loud

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Discuss is my fifth company and my second time as a CEO. According to data from Carta, fewer than 1% of companies achieve more than $10 million in recurring revenue while delivering a positive outcome for their investors. So far, I’m four for four. And it’s not because I am especially talented or anything like that.

There are lots of people who have done better than me. But if you look at why some people have the ability to repeat this over and over again, I think there is a method to it. And a huge part of that method is how you build culture.

How you build culture matters far more than your own strategy. No matter how brilliant your strategy is, if people don’t follow you there, you’re not going anywhere.

Learn more by watching or listening to Daniel on the Founders and Leaders Series podcast here:

The Culture Question

If you have a place where people wake up and are excited to work with you, you’re going to have a bigger impact on the world. As a lot of companies are moving back into the office, some companies are hybrid, and some companies work from home, you’re still competing with people’s other interests beyond your company.

Culture is where you can make that big difference. It’s not just about managing the hours that they’re sitting at a desk. It’s about how they wake up thinking about the problems that they want to solve. And culture is how you do that.

The Principles

I want to share three principles that have served me well across multiple companies, and then talk about one specific example of how making mistakes loudly created better outcomes than hiding them ever could.

1. Customer Focus Over Internal Gyrations

The first thing is to keep the reason why your customers love your product and service in mind. You can get really fixated on all the internal gyrations of running a company, pitching to VCs and private equity investors and so forth. You need to be very careful to limit your time there and focus as much time as possible on being product- and customer-focused.

Just because you achieve that product market fit that we all hear about in all the podcasts and news journals, you’re not done there. Your company needs to continue to meet your customers’ needs. How are you designing it, and how are you thinking about it? How people split their time needs to be very carefully customer-focused.

I’ve seen companies lose their way by becoming internally focused. Every meeting becomes about optimising internal processes, managing board relationships or preparing for the next funding round. Meanwhile, the actual customer problems that made the company successful in the first place drift out of focus.

2. Building Excitement to Solve Problems

The second principle is about what gets people out of bed in the morning. Whether you’re remote, hybrid or in-office, you’re competing for mindshare. Life is too short to work with people you dislike. Be very careful about your initial hires and the investors you work with.

You can make your life as miserable or as wonderful as you want. Don’t do something that’s a short-term win because you have a need. Make these decisions very carefully.

When you have the right people in the right culture, they don’t just show up for work. They wake up thinking about problems they want to solve. That shift from obligation to genuine interest is what separates companies that execute brilliantly from those that merely function.

3. Mistakes Should be Loud

The third principle is the one I want to focus on most. Have a culture where mistakes are OK. This is really important, and it’s really easy to say but really hard to do.

When we learn from our mistakes, we become better people. And when we are loud about the mistakes that we make, we end up allowing a culture where it’s OK as long as you learn from them.

If you have a culture where people hide mistakes, you’ll end up with a terrible result. If you have a culture where people learn from them, even if they’re expensive, you’ll get better results.

A Case Study in Loud Mistakes

Let me share a specific example. I was at a company where I was leading product, and I had a product manager with whom I disagreed about a direction for his product. We decided that there was data missing, and we went and got the data.

Turned out he was right. I was wrong.

And one of the best things I did was be really loud about it to the whole company, about how he was right and I was wrong. By owning up to that and making the expensive but important decision to shift to his strategy for that product, it allowed other people to feel like they could announce their mistakes.

This wasn’t just about admitting I was wrong in private. I made sure everyone in the company knew. I explained what I’d thought, what the data showed, why his approach was better and what we were going to do differently as a result.

That transparency had ripple effects throughout the organisation. People started raising concerns earlier instead of waiting until problems became crises. Teams started sharing data that contradicted their initial hypotheses instead of trying to make the data fit their assumptions. The quality of our product decisions improved dramatically because people weren’t afraid to be wrong.

The Cost of Hidden Mistakes

Compare that to organisations where mistakes are hidden. Someone makes a bad call. They know it’s not working, but admitting it feels like career suicide. So they double down, hoping they can somehow make it work before anyone notices.

By the time the problem becomes impossible to hide, you’ve wasted months of effort and significant budget on an approach that people knew wasn’t working. And you’ve reinforced a culture where the smart move is to hide problems rather than solve them.

That’s not a culture where people wake up excited to solve problems. That’s a culture where people wake up worried about protecting themselves.

Learning, Not Flagellation

There’s an important nuance here. Making mistakes loudly is about learning, not self-flagellation. The goal isn’t to shame people who were wrong. The goal is to extract every possible lesson from the mistake so the organisation doesn’t repeat it.

We do a very thorough annual planning process. I learned this from an amazing leader I worked for, David Guthrie. If you can evaluate the decisions that were made, why they were made, and then make that part of your future planning process – it’s a learning process and not just self-flagellation –, you’re going to make better decisions the next year.

Write down your decisions and the data you use to make them, then go back and look at them. We all have a tendency to rewrite history in our own minds, whether more positively or less positively, depending on our personality types. Documentation prevents that revisionism.

The Strategy Versus Culture Balance

I started this article by saying culture matters more than strategy. Let me be clear about what I mean. Of course you need a sound strategy. But brilliant strategy poorly executed beats terrible strategy brilliantly executed only in theory.

In practice, a brilliant strategy poorly executed usually fails. And the difference between poor execution and brilliant execution almost always comes down to culture. Do people care enough to execute well? Do they feel safe raising problems early? Do they collaborate effectively across teams? Do they maintain customer focus under pressure?

Those are all culture questions, not strategy questions.

The Bottom Line

If you’re building or leading a research technology company, you’re going to make mistakes. Everyone does. The question is whether those mistakes make your organisation stronger or weaker.

If you hide mistakes, punish people for being wrong, and allow internal politics to override customer focus, then every mistake makes you weaker. People learn to play it safe, to avoid risk and to prioritise looking good over doing good work.

If you make mistakes loudly, focus relentlessly on customers, build an environment where people wake up excited to solve problems, then mistakes make you stronger. You learn faster,  adapt quicker, and build an organisation that can execute brilliantly regardless of how the strategy evolves.

That’s how you build a company that achieves more than $10 million in recurring revenue while delivering positive outcomes for investors. Not by being brilliant, but by building a culture where everyone else can be brilliant too.

Learn more by watching or listening to Daniel on the Founders and Leaders Series podcast here:

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