Didier Elzinga and the art of letting go

Didier Elzinga has a disconcerting way of welcoming someone to a company: he wants to discuss the job they might take after it. The question arrived through Jill Witty, then Entelo’s vice-president of talent, who described her CEO offering new employees help with their next move. Elzinga’s first response was disbelief. Then he borrowed the idea.

A freelancer, Jo Cranford, supplied a useful test. She wanted to become the chief technology officer of her own startup. Elzinga offered introductions and fundraising decks. That evening, she decided to join Culture Amp full time. A conversation about leaving had helped someone arrive.

In January 2026, Elzinga made a move of his own. Caroline Rawlinson took over as Culture Amp’s CEO; he became executive chairman. The founder who encouraged people to grow beyond their current role now had a different role himself. His remit still includes strategy, partnerships and the company’s AI product vision. The chair has changed. The work continues.

The goblet, the deadline, the people

His name suggests a detour through France, although the family explanation is simpler. Born in Canberra to a Dutch father and an Australian mother, he says his parents chose a French name because they could not agree. He grew up in the Adelaide Hills, with a textile artist’s imaginary creatures around him and computers introduced by his father. At school, he used Photoshop 1.0 for his visual art work. Computer science at the University of Adelaide offered a way to keep technology and image-making together. It also came with an email account, which he remembers as part of the appeal. Even a career needs its small inducements.

Before employee surveys, there was Harry Potter. At Rising Sun Pictures, Elzinga worked in a business that created the Goblet of Fire for the film of the same name. There were also projects involving Batman, Superman and The Lord of the Rings. Ask a child to choose between enterprise software and a magical goblet, and the software has a difficult afternoon ahead.

Elzinga trained as a computer scientist and entered a small post-production company doing commercials and websites. He moved through systems administration and software engineering, then artistic and supervisory work, eventually becoming CEO at 26. The progression gave him an unusual view of a business: he had helped maintain its machines, make its images and manage its people.

Film production made teamwork tangible. He described bringing people from around the world into teams that could spend two years on a blockbuster. A finished shot depended on many people doing difficult work together under pressure. Culture, in that setting, had consequences on the screen and in the delivery schedule. His interest in it grew out of the job.

A sky with something missing

One lesson arrived in a film shot that was meant to be full of stars. Elzinga was responsible for finishing it. The tape went to Sydney. The director called Tony Clark, one of Rising Sun’s founders, furious: the stars were missing.

Clark listened, agreed to fix the mistake and personally delivered the corrected tape. Elzinga remembered that he did not pass the anger along to him. The immediate task was getting the shot right and reaching the screening. An angry director could wait for a lecture on accountability; the screening could not.

Elzinga credits Clark, Wayne Lewis and Gail Fuller with shaping his leadership. He also names Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar as a friend and adviser, and his wife, opera singer Greta Bradman, as an influence on how he presents and understands people. His account of becoming a leader is crowded with other people. He makes room for them.

Four desks and a piece of arithmetic

Culture Amp began in 2009. Its early setting was Inspire9, a Melbourne coworking space where Elzinga sat alongside Jon Williams and Doug English while they worked on separate businesses. They shared their discoveries and frustrations. Eventually, joining forces seemed sensible. Rod Hamilton became the fourth founder.

The name came from two words Elzinga wrote on paper. His original business plan was nearly as compact: find 10,000 organizations willing to spend $10,000 a year. That would make a $100 million business. A neat multiplication problem, with a rather untidy collection of human beings between the equals sign and the answer.

The early period included 18 months without taking money from the business, and products that failed. One concerned performance reviews; another drew on The Checklist Manifesto. The team started again. Winning Adobe became a moment of validation. Elzinga’s film experience gave him confidence that demanding work could be delivered, even when the customer was much larger than the supplier.

When the boardroom starts using your data

Aydin Senkut, an early Google employee and investor, called Elzinga in 2015 after encountering Culture Amp data in board meetings. The company’s work was travelling into rooms its founder had not entered. That is a useful distribution strategy: give customers something they want to carry upstairs.

Elzinga had initially approached venture firms as a route to potential customers. He wanted introductions to their portfolio companies. Money was another question, and one he approached cautiously. In 2014, Culture Amp chose to keep bootstrapping. He worried that funding could redirect the company toward growth at the expense of the culture it was trying to build.

By 2015, he had changed his mind. The founders felt more confident about growing their culture, and the mission demanded a pace they could not sustain alone. The Series A raised US$6.3 million. His explanation allows both decisions to make sense in their own moment. A previous conviction did not have to become a permanent instruction.

In July 2021, Culture Amp announced a US$100 million Series F at a valuation above US$1.5 billion. The round was led by TDM Growth Partners and Sequoia Capital China. At that point, the company said its platform served more than 4,000 organizations. The modest-looking multiplication had acquired a substantial supporting cast.

The survey comes with an obligation

For someone who built a company around employee feedback, Elzinga is alert to how irritating feedback requests can become. An organization asks for opinions, then asks again. Employees remember answering. They may struggle to remember anything happening afterwards.

“People don’t get survey fatigue, they get lack-of-action fatigue.”

Didier Elzinga

His prescription is straightforward: listen, act and communicate. The last step matters because people may never connect a change to the comments that helped cause it. Asking a question creates an obligation to explain what followed. A survey is easy to send. The return message requires a decision.

He also resists treating culture as an excuse to avoid demanding work. His writing argues that a strong culture can attract some people and repel others. A company needs clarity about what it is asking people to accomplish. The point has an edge: a pleasant workplace still needs to deliver, and belonging cannot mean agreement about everything.

Please do not read the slides aloud

In 2018, Elzinga published a user guide to working with him, borrowing the idea from Stripe’s Claire Hughes Johnson. He prefers the larger picture first, followed by detail. He understands through similarities. He wants the point of a meeting to emerge quickly, before a procession of slides has exhausted everyone’s goodwill.

If there is a deck, he wants time to read it and then discuss questions. Having someone explain information he has already absorbed irritates him. For a difficult problem, he prefers moving from text toward a call or a face-to-face discussion. Claims should withstand scrutiny, including his own. The guide gives colleagues permission to challenge his generalizations.

Public speaking did not come easily. At school, he recalled a raspy voice, trembling hands and a shaking lectern. He accepted speaking engagements to improve, then took David Griggs’s six-week Beyond Words course. His later writing treats storytelling as a practical leadership skill: a story can travel from one person to another without the CEO attending every meeting.

He remembers a New York panel where another speaker noticed the audience leaning forward as he told a story. The reaction helped him appreciate something his film career had not fully taught him. Making a message memorable becomes more consequential when the people who need it are spread across offices and time zones.

The harder skill: sitting on your hands

There is another side to Elzinga’s appetite for involvement. He has described a tendency to see a problem and rush in to help. As CEO, that impulse could make him useful in the moment while leaving the organization dependent on his intervention. The solution might be better people, training or structures.

He has spoken candidly about learning to hold back. It is an awkward adjustment for someone whose earlier work rewarded finding a way to get a shot finished. A growing software company gives him a different question: what happens after he fixes this particular problem? If the answer is that everyone waits for him next time, the fix has a short shelf life.

The executive-chair transition puts that question in a new setting. Rawlinson runs the company; Elzinga continues to work on its longer horizon. Culture Amp’s August 2026 announcement described bringing engagement and performance insights into AI assistants through MCP connectivity. The tools have changed considerably since the first survey product.

The original concern remains recognizable: how to help people understand their organization and do something useful with that understanding. Elzinga left a career making images to work on that problem. He has now left the CEO’s chair while staying with it. For a founder who asks employees about their next job, there is a certain satisfaction in finally having a fresh answer of his own.