What Makes PeerStreet’s Culture Unique?

Glenn Leibowitz just wrote a great piece in Inc. Magazine about how we’re creating our culture at PeerStreet, borrowing heavily from things I learned and experienced at Google. I worked at Google for nearly ten years before co-founding PeerStreet with Brew and Alex. From the beginning, creating a great culture is something we all believed was important. But what does that mean? Our team consists of talented people who came to PeerStreet from places like Yahoo, Amazon, EA, prestigious law firms, large Wall Street firms, and more. Our culture has developed as a result of all our collective experiences and backgrounds.

Flawed Cultures Make Headlines

The topic of culture in the workplace is particularly relevant today. It’s somewhat risky even talking about culture because if anything ever goes wrong, it’s easy for people to point a finger and yell, “hypocrite!” And to be sure, PeerStreet’s culture isn’t perfect. No company’s culture is. There have been several big stories about bad trends that create toxic cultures in the news. For example, I didn’t see anyone predict Uber’s cultural problems, but it continues to make headlines. Amazon experienced a similar plight a couple years ago. Bad stories make the front page, but in my opinion, good culture is much more interesting and harder to create. Like credibility, it is something that takes a long time to build, but takes very little to ruin.

Culture Constantly Changes

Some say a company’s culture is set by the time you hit 50 people. There’s probably some truth in that, but I know from experience that company cultures change over time; sometimes for the better, other times for the worse. Our view is that creating our company culture is never done. We spend time thinking about it, improving upon it and growing our team in a way that emulates our core values.

We borrow heavily from Google. But ultimately, PeerStreet’s culture is its own; a reflection of our people.