On the 8th of February we co-hosted a Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast breakfast event with Silicon Valley Bank at their Finsbury Square office in East London.

The inimitable Oli Barrett kicked things off and did a masterful job of energising the crowd before the caffeine kicked in. I started the morning session with a presentation (Video here & Slideshare here) on why culture is a company’s greatest asset and what high growth companies like Hubble, Duel, AudioBooks, CharlieHR and Skimlinks are doing to live their values, and develop and embed their company’s culture.

Oli moderated the panel discussion (Video here), the panelists were:

• Suarav Chopra – CEO Perkbox
• Rob O’Donovan – CEO CharlieHR
• Alastair MacLeod – MD Solera
• Rosh Wijarathna – Director UK Corporate Banking SVB
• Colette Ballou – CEO Ballou PR

The thing about culture is there is no right or wrong culture. The other thing about company culture is that it doesn't have to be a happy family and this was demonstrated during the panel discussion where Alastair MacLeod discussed Solera's brutal culture. Solera recently exited for $6.5 billion.

After the panel session I sat down with Nilan Peiris to discuss the culture that Transferwise has built. The company's culture is the magic that's enabled them to scale from 60 to over 600 people in two and a half years (Video here).

Company culture is clearly a hot topic right now as we had over 100 CEOs, co-founders and investors join us for a sold out breakfast event, which also had a wait-list of 140 people.