From 100 to 300 – how Trustpilot creates cohesiveness in a growing company

Maintaining the company culture in a growing startup can be hard. How do you make a team consisting of 300 employees divided between three countries pull in the same direction? Peter Holten Mühlman, founder of Trustpilot, explains what their journey has taught him.

Being a “startup” is popular. It is colourful, youthful and fun. It is not a process, nor standardisation and hierarchy.

“Everyone thinks it is fun to be a successful startup with 50 employees,” Peter Holten Mühlman says about the culture in the Danish startup Trustpilot. Culture has been a priority and something that the co-founder and the loyal people in the company all have been part of creating and maintaining.   

At the same time the startup dream also includes becoming something unique with a massive turnover – however, this often requires a greater organisation and not least a great deal of organising. In other words one needs to go beyond both the core team and the company of 50 employees to reach one’s goals as a startup. The company needs to grow.

“It is kind of like being a teenager, you aren’t done figuring it out before you are a grown up,” says Peter Holten Mühlman who has grown Trustpilot from being a small startup based in the coworking space Startup City in Aarhus, Denmark to having 300 employees in New York, London and the heart of the old Copenhagen.

Having a good company culture is easy – when you are small

Company cultures almost always emerge more or less by themselves with time. This is however not always good company culture. Regardless of the size of the company it is important to create cohesiveness between people and departments in a startup in order to make everything run smoothly.

“As long as you are less than 100 employees the cohesiveness emerges by itself. You have a feeling that you are in the same boat, and everyone knows one another,” Peter Holten Mühlman explains.

He believes that he still knows all of his 300 employees – although some better than other. Yet he admits that at some point he has to give up keeping up with knowing who everybody are and what they are doing.

“Later on you might only relate to your department or maybe only your team,” Peter Holten Mühlman explains

Cut the email correspondence and understand each other

Peter Holten Mühlman believes that the number one factor for a well-functioning company culture is to emphasise the internal communication. Everyone must realise what the company is doing and in particular what it isn’t doing. His experience is that email correspondences fail in regards to this

“When you try to solve problems via email my experience is that people often over interpret the written word,” Peter Holten Mühlman explains, and tells that employees in Trustpilot are flown from Copenhagen to London and New York and vice versa.

“At our office people flies a lot back and forth between the various departments simply because it works best to meet in person. You can’t solve problems via email.”

He believes that in the end it is all about human beings running the company – in spite of the size. The founder has to take a step back and trust his own recruitment abilities.

According to Peter Holten Mühlman the most noble job for a founder in a growing company is to recruit new people. Because in the end it is all about making the employees discover the human core in which there is a common sympathy for each other and where you can cope with disagreements emerging along the way.

“We only recruit people who we believe fit into the team and our company culture,” is the conclusion from the CEO.

A global market

Being a Danish company with almost only 10 percent of its activities left in the home country it is only natural that the Copenhagen office holds several nationalities in the various teams. The Danish startup has grown from 127 employees a year ago to 325 employees divided between three continents today.

The boom came after a huge investment with almost 140 million Danish Kroner in January 2014. This meant that the startup really could make it big on a global basis with customers in 65 countries and offices in Copenhagen, London, New York and Melbourne.

The company, which launched in 2007, today holds 12 million user reviews of more than 100,000 companies. Every day the site experiences more than 10,000 new users and new reviews are written every 5 seconds.

You can hear more of Peter Holten Mühlmann’s experiences as he speaks at the TechBBQ conference on the 20. of May in Copenhagen.