One prerogative that founders have is that they get to set the company's culture. It's particularly important for founders to be cognizant of this phenomenon, because once a culture is set it's very difficult to change.  It's best to carefully construct the culture of the company from the beginning.

From our experience, the company's culture comes from the top.  If the founders are disrespectful to customers, for example by referring to them as "idiots" behind closed doors, then it permeates the culture and negatively affects the way all employees think about the customers.  If the founders talk about coworkers behind their backs, then that trickles down as well.  If they live it and expect everybody else to do the same, then it becomes the culture.

When forming Comprehend Systems, Jud and I didn't want to develop a long list describing the traits of our desired culture.  Long lists get unwieldy and difficult to practically implement.  The culture description needs be short so that it's easy to remember, easy to convey, and easy to follow.  It should be indisputable, and everybody at the company should understand and believe in it.  

At Comprehend, we distilled our culture description to one sentence.  In fact, it's just two words, and from these two words, our whole culture falls into place.  It's our one guiding principle.  

     No Egos. 

We want to make sure that every person at Comprehend does not have an ego.  Specifically, we do not want them to let their ego get in the way of their work.  If somebody doesn't understand something, they shouldn't be embarrassed to ask.  Nobody knows everything, so there's no need to pretend.  Most likely, it's easier to find somebody who knows the answer to a question, instead of covering up or spending too long without the answer.   Everybody makes mistakes.  We have, and we'll make many more.  Instead of dancing around admitting there's a problem, we'd rather find a remedy.

We're not saying not to be confident.  Or to be proud of being wrong.  Or not to share opinions.  We simply believe that it's important to remain humble and not let silly problems get in the way because of ego.  We've heard about a related motto that is in effect a corollary of No Egos: "strong opinions, loosely held", meaning that everybody bring their strong opinions to the table, makes their case, but then group decides on one and everybody moves on.

At Comprehend, we're all on the same team and we all have a common goal: to grow this company into the amazing business that we know it can be.  When somebody is following this principle, it's impossible that it'll lead us to think they're dumb, or to hold it against them.  There is nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about.  Let's work as a team, and get to where we know we can be as quickly as possible.

Comprehend Systems makes next generaton reporting and visualization software which works across multiple, disparate datasets.  Also, we're hiring engineers!  If you're interested, you can read more about the positions here, or submit your resume to careers@comprehend.com.

We were mentioned in Steven Levy's article about YCombnator, which appeared in the June 2011 issue of Wired Magazine.  He followed around the entire batch of YC companies for the whole three months.  Here's what he had to say about Comprehend Systems, specifically about our presentation on Demo Day:

It’s 1 pm when Rick Morrison, cofounder of a firm called Comprehend Systems makes the first presentation. His company’s mission is complicated—it involves cross-database interactions that streamline the process of pharmaceutical drug testing—and a couple of days earlier, Morrison and his partner were squabbling with Graham about how technical the presentation should be. But now, taking Graham’s advice, Morrison emphasizes the importance of efficient testing, the long experience of the founders, and the huge potential market. The audience sits in rapt attention. One demo down.

The article does a great job to sum up what the YC experience was like for us.  You can read the whole article here.

Welcome to the Comprehend Systems blog!  We create software that connects multiple, disparate databases in real time, while leaving the data in place.  Our first product is Comprehend Clinical, which is a reporting and visualization tool specifically made for clinical trial data.  It's built on top of Comprehend Systems technology, and is easy to use and extremely powerful.

We face very exciting technical challenges and we're hiring!  Please drop us a line if you're interested in learning more about our company, our software, or anything else!

Also, you can find the latest Comprehend Clinical news on The Comprehend Clinical Blog.