Hi, I'm Chris.

How To Avoid Bad Startup Culture

If you are not paying attention to your startup culture, I have news for you: you are already building a culture into your company. Chances are that is not the culture you want.

Every company has a culture. It is a summation of all the habits and practices that make up the work. It is every choice, good or bad, made by every person involved. Every action sets a precedent, a “how we do things here.”

This is how we are wired. We are naturally social beings and are strongly predisposed to fit in to the group we find ourselves in, and to emulate their behaviour. This reinforces culture further, and compounds when more people are involved.

A culture grows like plants in a garden. You cannot stop the life from growing, but you can decide how and where it grows. Left unattended, weeds will grow alongside the flowers. The key is recognising this and putting in the work to shape it.

Here is a quick primer on how to do the minimum to avoid bad culture, and how to get good culture going with a little attention every so often.

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How to Build a Robust LLM Application

Last month at Cherrypick we launched a brand new meal generator that uses LLMs to create personalized meal plans.

It has been a great success and we are pleased with the results. Customers are changing their plans 30% less and using their plans in their baskets 14% more.

However, getting to this point was not straightforward, and we learned many things that can go wrong when building these types of systems.

Here is what we learned about building an LLM-based product that actually works, and ends up in production rather than languishing in an investor deck as a cool tech demo.

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Why Hybrid Work Works

As someone who lives an hour and a half from my London office, I love working from home. I can help my teenagers out of the door in the morning, and I am present when the family comes home. I can have coffee with my wife Ellie before we start work. I prepare dinner during my lunch break, and receive deliveries. I can contribute more effort during my day to Cherrypick, free from distractions, interruptions and the long commute. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week in London.

I also love working from the office. It is an opportunity to spend real time with the people I work with. Communication is easier and I spend less time on screens. I can train less experienced colleagues much more efficiently than video chat. I can ask for and give advice and help in person, cutting down long feedback cycles. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week from home.

Much of the debate around hybrid working appears to be a zero sum argument about why working from home is “better” or “worse”, and why working in the office is “more” or “less” productive.

One is not better than the other; they are just different. I think we need both for a balanced life.

Here are some pointers for how to have a productive conversation about hybrid in your team.

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