Culture is the operating system of your company. It determines how decisions are made, how conflicts are resolved, how information flows, and how people treat each other. Unlike software, you cannot rewrite it from scratch once it is established.
Values Must Be Actionable
Vague values like 'excellence' and 'innovation' are meaningless. Actionable values are specific enough to guide decisions: 'We ship weekly' tells engineers how to scope work. 'We default to transparency' tells managers to share information broadly. 'We disagree and commit' tells teams how to resolve conflicts.
Culture Is What You Tolerate
Your real culture is not what you write on the wall -- it is what you tolerate. If you value collaboration but tolerate brilliant jerks, your actual culture is that individual performance matters more than teamwork. If you value customer obsession but never talk to customers, your actual culture is internal-facing.
Hiring for Culture Add, Not Culture Fit
Culture fit can become a euphemism for homogeneity. Instead, hire for culture add: people who share your core values but bring different perspectives, backgrounds, and approaches. This creates the diversity of thought that drives innovation.
Rituals and Traditions
The most resilient cultures are built on shared rituals: weekly demos where anyone can present what they built, monthly retrospectives, quarterly offsites, celebration of both wins and intelligent failures. These rituals create the emotional bonds that sustain teams through hard times.
The Founder's Role
As a founder, you are the chief culture officer whether you like it or not. Every action you take -- how you handle stress, how you give feedback, how you make decisions -- sets the standard for the entire organization.
