When I started Dakota in 2006, I wasn't thinking about company culture or operating principles. I was thinking about how to get meetings, close deals, and keep the lights on.
The Dakota-isms came later. Not from a whiteboard session or a consultant. They came from watching what actually worked, and watching what didn't, over years of being in the trenches of fundraising, sales, and building a team from scratch.
Some of them sound obvious when you write them down. Most of them are only obvious in retrospect.
Early on I spent a lot of time trying to convince people who weren't going to buy. Not because I didn't know better intellectually, but because it felt like giving up to walk away. What I eventually learned is that walking away from a bad fit isn't giving up. It's how you protect the time you need for the people who are actually ready. Qualification is a skill, and most salespeople, including me for a long time, are bad at it.
The firms that raise capital consistently aren't always the ones with the best product. They're the ones who can explain what they do clearly, quickly, and in a way that makes the listener feel like the explanation was made for them. I've watched great investment strategies die in a meeting because nobody in the room could translate them into plain language. Clarity is a competitive advantage and most people underinvest in it.
I cannot count the number of deals I've seen stall not because of a bad meeting but because of no meeting after the meeting. People are busy. They don't remember you the way you remember them. A disciplined follow-up system isn't pushy. It's respectful of the fact that you're one of a hundred things on someone's plate. The deals that close are almost never the ones where the other person followed up with you.
This one took me longer than it should have. In fundraising especially, there is so much that is genuinely outside your control: markets, timing, allocator mandates, who got there first. Early on I spent too much energy frustrated by all of that. The shift happened when I started treating process as the outcome rather than the result. If the process is right, the results follow. Not always immediately. But they follow.
At some point we calculated that the average distance between any two desks in our office was about 8 feet. A surprising number of problems that become email chains or Slack threads would resolve faster if someone just stood up. This isn't really about physical proximity. It's about a bias toward direct communication. Questions asked in person get better answers than questions sent into a void.
Individual heroics feel good in the moment and create messes that outlast the win. I've done it myself. The times I've gone off-script, skipped a step, trusted my gut over the system, sometimes it worked out. But the cost to the team around me, even when it worked, was usually higher than I accounted for. Consistency is a team sport.
This is the one I come back to most with younger people on the team. So much opportunity just sits there waiting because someone didn't want to seem presumptuous, or wasn't sure if the timing was right, or talked themselves out of it before they even tried. Ask for the meeting. Ask for next steps. Ask for the business. Most people are not asking and the ones who are have a significant advantage.
Not permanently. But there is a moment in any project where more thinking becomes a substitute for doing. I've been guilty of this, iterating on a plan past the point where iteration adds anything, because starting feels riskier than refining. At some point the plan is good enough and the only thing left is to execute it. Turn your brain off means get out of your own way.
This one I feel strongly about. "Great meeting" is what you say when nothing happened. If a meeting was actually great, if something moved, if a decision got made, if next steps are clear, you don't need to say it was great. You just describe the outcome. When I hear "great meeting" as a debrief, I start asking questions, because usually it means we liked the people but didn't advance anything.
I first heard this from someone describing how to commit to something before you've figured out how to do it. If you wait until you're ready, you often never go. Declaring the intention, publicly, to people who will hold you to it, forces a different kind of problem-solving. It's worked for me more times than the more cautious approach would have.
Last and probably the one that gets dismissed most easily. But I mean it seriously. This work is long and hard and the cycles are long and the feedback is slow. If you're not enjoying most of it most of the time, that's a problem worth solving. The people I've watched burn out in this industry were rarely the ones working the hardest. They were the ones who stopped finding any of it interesting. Fun isn't a perk. It's a sustainability strategy.
None of these came from a business book. They came from doing the thing, getting it wrong, and figuring out what to do differently. If they're useful to you, take them. If your version looks different, that's fine too. The point was never the list. The point was building a language that a team could actually use.
That's what these are for.
