31: John O'Nolan on Building and Maintaining Your Startup's Culture

Today, on The Early-Stage Founder Show, I’m talking with John O’Nolan, the co-founder of Ghost, a fully open source, hackable platform for building and running modern online publications. Ghost was founded in 2013 after a very successful Kickstarter campaign, and today it has been installed over 1 million times and the company has an annual run rate of over $760,000 at the time of this recording.  Ghost is also structured as a non-profit foundation because from the beginning John and his team have wanted to remain true to its users, no shareholders. This means that the company can never be bought or sold, and all revenue is reinvested into the product and community. In our chat, we cover everything from how John managed to get 100,000 signups within the first 24 hours of his campaign to the whirlwind that came after the campaign ended. Where we really dive in, though, is how Ghost has established and maintained a strong culture as the team grows and why that is so important to their success.  If you want to grow without losing sight of your values, even if those values are motivated by profit, then this is the episode for you.