The New Culture Code: How to Wire Your Team for Risk-Taking

Elizabeth Bailey Weil
3 min readNov 2, 2021

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by Elizabeth Weil, Managing Partner, Scribble VC

Making risk-taking a cornerstone of your culture leads to amazing things. Here, Superplastic’s virtual celebrities & Christie’s joined forces to “blow up”​ an auction house.

This is #5 of 8 “flash content drops” in collaboration with MOMA artist & entrepreneur Paul Budnitz (CEO, Superplastic). We cover The 3 Types of Intelligence, the Future of NFTs, the “Creator Brain”, and How to Stoke Risk-Taking. You can follow me on twitter to get them.

(p.s. SUPERPLASTIC IS HIRING! If you want to join a rocketship or know someone who should, Superplastic is hiring a Director of Marketing, a Marketing Manager, and a Paid Media Specialist.)

“I tell my team — ‘This job is going to work or not work based on who we are. Not who we pretend to be.” — Paul Budnitz, Founder & CEO, Superplastic

  • In extreme environments like startups where you’re reinventing how the world operates, it takes the Founders and leaders a tremendous amount of energy to keep people aligned, excited, and willing to take risks.
  • For example, we’re making all these insane characters. We’re opening stores with holograms. We’re putting out an animated pop group. We’re making a movie. We’re doing all this crazy crypto stuff, creating tokens. And we’re doing a physical product, a sushi restaurant now in Miami, too.
  • So that’s a high stakes environment. Now the question is — what is the one essential thing that will inspire a culture of risk taking?
  • It’s Permission. I really think it’s permission to be who you are, the realization that you are not going to succeed pretending to be other than you are.
  • In my thirties I was diagnosed with borderline autism. I taught myself to look people in the eye because I never did. I think not giving eye contact had become part of the way I had to defend myself as a kid. Because I was a weirdo. And so for me, creating an environment where people feel safe to be who they are, because who they are is awesome, comes from a very personal place.
  • I tell my team — “This job is going to work or not work based on who we are. Not who we pretend to be.”
  • The conditions you need for truly innovating is finding the right crazy people, and letting them just be who they are.

Stay Tuned → Coming up at 2pm today — Culture Hack: The Superplastic “Fail Wheel” (1 min read). Follow Elizabeth on Twitter to get this content drop.

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Elizabeth Bailey Weil
Elizabeth Bailey Weil

Written by Elizabeth Bailey Weil

Founder and GP @ Scribble (scribble.vc). Prev. a16z, Twitter. Investor: SpaceX, Slack, Coinbase, Figma, Clubhouse, Calm, Grab. & more. Mom of 3. Ultra-runner.

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