Ashlee Cloud, former People Engagement Manager at Skookum Digital Works (Skookum ranked No. 1 in the small companies category for the 2015 Best Places to Work, Denver Business Journal) & Leah Zions, co-founder & CMO of Team & Culture will lead a panel discussion of CEO’s / Founders who have built great culture and are fanatical about the subject of culture. Given that this is Startup Week, the panel will speak to the importance of thinking about culture from the start. From the moment you start your company, you need to put a strong culture in place and nurture it every single day. Your culture is a living breathing thing, if you fail to feed it and neglect it, it will die and the company won’t be far behind.

Here a few of the topics that will be addressed:

What is culture?
Why does culture matter?
How do you scale and stay true to your values?
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly — War & Horror Stories about good & bad culture.

Panelists:

Zach Nies, Managing Director of TechStars. Zach was previously the Chief Technologist at Rally Software. Zach will discuss why culture matters for investors.

Nathan Greenlee- Chief Culture Officer @ Team & Culture. Nathan has helped launch tech & big data startups as well and helped pioneer the new space market. The company sold over half a billion dollars in spaceflight missions, including self-funded private citizens. Nathan passionately believes culture needs to be tracked just as much as any other critical business components; sales, marketing, ops...

Dan Lynn- TechStars alumni, co-founder of Full Contact. Dan is currently the CEO of CodeFutures. Dan has experienced the entire culture spectrum from great to horrible. Dan is a leading startup & culture thought leader.

Dr. Natalie Baumgartner- Dr. Natalie Baumgartner is a Co-Founder and the Chief Psychologist at RoundPegg. RoundPegg is an online culture intelligence platform that quantifies the unique culture of organizations and then provides tools to align employee hiring, development, and engagement. Natalie is passionate about helping people find "fit" in the workplace - and about the power that culture fit has to revolutionize how we work. She presented a TED talk in June 2012 - 9 minutes on the importance of fit.

Krista Morgan - Krista Morgan is cofounder and CEO of P2Binvestor, a Denver-based crowdlending platform that provides working capital financing to growing businesses underserved by traditional financial institutions. She was recently published on Inc.com for her article on developing a strong and effective startup culture. She has a commitment to and passion for building diverse teams, mentoring other women entrepreneurs, sharing her knowledge about business finance, and teaching others about fundraising and scaling a startup.

Brian Chesky CEO of Airbnb has defined culture as this:

"Culture is a thousand things, a thousand times. It’s living the core values when you hire; when you write an email; when you are working on a project; when you are walking in the hall. We have the power, by living the values, to build the culture. We also have the power, by breaking the values, to fuck up the culture. Each one of us has this opportunity, this burden. So how do we build culture? By upholding our core values in everything we do.”