Company culture is the personality of a company. It defines the core values company is based on and describes the environment in which teams work, create and come up with new solutions. Culture is as important as the business strategy because it has great impact on team members’ satisfaction, motivation, performance and productivity. 

Al Eisaian, the co-founder and CEO of IntelinAir has a long journey as a serial entrepreneur and has a comprehensive understanding of building teams and keeping them motivated. 

Recently Al had a talk at AUA on the topic of “Mindset Matters” based on lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey and shared his thoughts on building a team, setting up a culture and investing in teams with hetq.am. 

Al considers company culture to be the main fundamental factor of success. People have different understanding of what company culture is. Al’s definition is the following: Company culture is the practices people have within a company-how they treat each other, customers and what type of ambitions they have. 

The founders start the company, but the culture is built by everyone.  It's absolutely crucial that the first people that join the company are selected based on sharing certain values. 

Based on his own experience as a founder of many companies, Al states that they failed when didn’t have enough focus on making sure that people are in alignment and won when had explicit discussion about the vision and the way they would treat team members and customers. 

While setting up a culture, a certain emphasis should be put on having a customer centric approach, which should be communicated to all team members. 

This is how Al explains. Companies exist for two reasons: to create a differentiated value proposition serving certain set of humans in the world and then to sell and market that value. It really comes down to the existential question “Why does a company exist”. While setting up values founders should start with customers at a core, then based on what they want to do for those customers have science, technology, product around it and then have customers service and satisfaction all around them. 

As an investor he invests in teams which understand that customers come first. Al makes sure that the teams he invests in show commitment  and stick around with a project long enough and don’t give up when a problem occurs. He doesn't like portfolio way of being a founder, where the same person works on different projects and has different consulting jobs at the same time. This is not impressive for an investor, who doesn't see any full commitment to a certain project and idea.