When you read about startups in the press, company culture is often illustrated with pictures of ping pong tables, cold brew taps, and bean bag chairs. This creates a dangerous illusion for new founders. It suggests that culture is something you buy.
In reality, company culture is the set of shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterize an organization. It is not the furniture. It is the operating system of your human capital. It is the unspoken instruction manual that tells your employees how to behave when you are not in the room.
For a startup, culture is an existential survival mechanism. In a small team, everyone needs to move with the same velocity and direction. A undefined culture leads to friction, and friction kills speed.
The Operating System of Decisions
#Think of culture as a heuristic for decision making. You cannot write a policy for every single situation that will arise. You cannot predict every server crash, every angry customer, or every ethical dilemma.
Instead, you instill a culture that guides the response. If your culture values speed over perfection, your engineer will patch the bug immediately. If your culture values precision over speed, they will take three days to rewrite the code base.
Neither approach is inherently wrong, but they are different cultures. If you have half the team optimizing for speed and the other half for precision, you have a broken culture.
Culture vs. Perks
#It is vital to distinguish between culture and perks.
- Perks are benefits you give to employees. Free lunch is a perk. Remote work is a perk. Generous vacation time is a perk.
- Culture is how you treat each other and how you do the work. Being honest about bad news is culture. staying late to help a teammate is culture.
Perks attract people to the company. Culture determines who stays and who succeeds. You can have the best perks in the world and still have a toxic culture where political backstabbing is rewarded. Conversely, you can have zero perks and a culture of intense camaraderie and high performance.
The Hiring and Firing Filter
#The most practical application of culture is in recruitment. Founders often hire for skill and hope for culture fit. This is backward.
Culture should be used as a weapon to filter people out. If your culture is intense and requires long hours, you should be honest about that so people who want work life balance do not join. If you hire someone who does not share your core values, they will become a toxic agent within the organization, no matter how talented they are.
Furthermore, culture is defined by the worst behavior you tolerate. If a high performing sales rep harasses the support team and you do not fire them, your culture is now one that tolerates harassment for money.
The Founder’s Mirror
#Finally, founders must accept that the culture is a reflection of themselves. It amplifies your personality traits. If you are disorganized, the company will be chaotic. If you are secretive, the company will be political.
You have to ask yourself hard questions. Are you modeling the behavior you want to see? Culture is not what you write on the wall. It is what you do every single day.