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How to build culture in a startup

Famed management consultant, Peter Drucker, coined the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. And he was right. There is no best way however, to build culture in a company, there only wrong way is to fail to do so at all.

It’s rare that you get so much leverage in something that pulling it in the right direction can improve every single departments performance by 1-3-5%. Sometimes more.

But culture can’t just be a throw away line. It has to be something that has lived on a daily basis. Enron for example, had core their values etched into the marble of their building. Number one was 'integrity’. How did that work out for them?

Today we are diving back in with some of our founders and leaders we have spoken to in the past to see how they have gone about crafting their unique company cultures. Hopefully we can pick up a thing or two from them. Here goes.

John Howard - Founder at Slingshot

We’re tiny so culture has been more tough than I would have thought. I make sure to talk to everyone every single day in some capacity (not only about work related items). We’re a very tight-knit team. We frequently get lunch, go on walks (we’re located in a historic district). You might even catch us at the local ice cream shop, Scoops!

Alexa Grabell - Co-Founder & CEO at Pocus

I think one of the most important things is to set clear values. The process for creating values should be ever-evolving. The first set of values were solely built by my co-founder and I, the version we have now was created by the team.

At our first offsite we wrote down what made each member of the team uniquely good at what they did - we synthesized the takeaways into our values. One of our most recent hires said something during her interview process that really stuck with me: “I can tell all of you genuinely like each other.”

When hiring, we very intentionally screen for culture in the interview process. Every role has a culture interview where we are screening for these values. We also use the opportunity to explicitly share what it’s like working at Pocus, how these values manifest so there’s mutual alignment.

By doing this we set clear expectations on how we work as a company to embody those values. We built an extensive how WE work and how YOU work guide in Notion that we send to employees before they join so theres strong alignment on expectations.

It’s important also to fire fast for culture mis-alignment. It’s tempting to just let culture misalignment slide, especially if the hire is great at what they do - this is dangerous at any size. If you want a strong culture, you have to reinforce values.

And we reward the team often. Specifically those members embodying what makes our culture great. We call these value awards and we give them out monthly during all hands. We also encourage the entire team to post in our #kudos channel in Slack to highlight these wins.

Ajay Prakash - Founder & CEO at EntryLevel

We want to build a supportive culture that is focused around helping everyone work on OKRs without micromanaging them. Here’s what we’ve tried to make that happen:

• Taco Leaderboard: When we tried to do a ‘kudos’ initiatives where team members can give each other appreciation for their work or help - it was hard to enforce it. However, we discovered the easiest possible way of doing it was “Tacos on Slack” and just getting key team members to religiously do it. The rest of the team followed, and now it’s normalised.

• Customer Wins: One of the things I noticed was just how much love we get in socials and online. I wanted the product and development teams (who primarily just see issues and problems all day) to really see these wins as well. So we have a Slack channel for this and also discuss it every Monday. It helps humanise some of the goals we have around growth or student completions.

• Friday Townhalls: Every Friday, every team member comes together and we play games or discuss anything we’d like. It’s more of an informal session for the team to bond with each other. It’s always tricky to maintain relationships in remote working so we use Friday meetings as an opportunity to do this

• Wednesday Virtual Co-working: A recent addition where we just work together on a Google Hangouts link where interruptions and chit chat are encouraged.

To be honest, we haven’t figured this out perfectly. We’re always trying new things and looking to improve our culture but these are some things that have worked reasonably well.

Niki Scevak - Co-Founder & Partner at Blackbird

One of our values is to make our kids proud: to do everything with integrity, in a way that we’d be happy to tell our kids about. We try to maintain a high level of transparency within the team to nurture this sense of ownership and shared vision, as well as continuing to keep the community we serve at the centre of everything we do.

For instance, having startup founders join our off-sites and town hall meetings, building opportunities for Blackbird team to shadow portfolio operators or learn from their experience, and encouraging them to take part in community programs and events.

A couple of years ago and as Blackbird had grown from 10 to 50+ people, we realised we needed to define the “Blackbird way” of doing things. We developed a set of Operating Principles - a way for every Blackbird to be able to have an internal compass for making decisions with more autonomy and less ambiguity.

Some of these operating principles, like ‘All in Together’ refer to continuing to act like a scrappy startup, where everyone takes out the trash or will roll their sleeves up to get the job done, while others, like ‘Pain is Progress’ reflect our belief in leaning into our mistakes and failures rather than shying away from them.

Hubspot’s Culture Code

One of most famous culture documents in Silicon Valley is Hubspot’s Culture Code. It’s a 128-page manifesto that shows just how much goes into creating a great culture. This living document has now been updated over 25 times since it’s creation and it will be built upon 25 more no doubt.

The interesting thing about Hubspot, is that they call their Culture Code a product. An internal product. Dharmesh Shah, cofounder of HubSpot and current CTO, talks about the hundreds of hours he has spent on this internal document, come product. They do this because they know that this is the biggest force multiplier they have inside of the business.

Ross Chaldecott - Co-Founder & CEO at Kinde

For us, culture has always been something we set out to craft intentionally. Instead of making it an accidental thing that just happened. This starts with our values. A lot of founders get started by hiring a bunch of people who look and sound like themselves. People they would want to have a beer with. Over time the company grows up and somebody realizes they need values. So they take a look at what characteristics make a successful employee at the company and then try to codify and distill that essence down into a set of values.

This works fine – and is a very standard approach to doing it. The trouble is – it leaves your values, and your culture, largely up to chance until you do that work later.

At Kinde we did something different. We sat down and tried to understand what would be a great culture. One that we would love to work in. A place that would be incredible. And then we used that to define our values. These are aspirational values rather than responsive values. To be valuable every value has to be something that, while desirable at Kinde, might be undesirable elsewhere in a different company and culture. That’s how you know they’re not just platitudes.

To give you an example, our value of ‘Human kindness, gentle manners’ is probably the one I hear mentioned most often by the team when describing each other. And you can definitely see it in the people we attract and the people we hire. There is just a gentleness in our team that I love, and I don’t think you see it that often. Calm determination at work, to me, is far more powerful than the opposite value – that would be highly prized in other companies – of being bold and strong and domineering.

We use our values constantly. They’re not just things we look at from time to time. They’re a core part of our culture. We talk about them frequently and also use then for all of our hiring. Every person who works at Kinde does a values interview. To make sure they feel like they’ll be a good fit for the culture we’ve created.

So it all starts with values. From there it’s about making sure we create a place where people love to work, and are challenged by the problems that they get to solve. Bored people aren’t going to be highly motivated people. We want them to be challenged, and to challenge and inspire each other to be as incredible as possible.

Storytelling is another major part of making sure we’re all aligned on the culture we’re trying to create. In every person’s first week I sit down with them for two hours and walk them through every part of Kinde. How it works, how it makes money and how we win. We also speak at length about our values and why they matter. The aim is to make sure that they understand what we are like and how we behave. We don’t leave anything up to chance.

Lastly, I think a lot of it comes down to how the leadership behaves. If our leaders behave badly, then this will set the precedent. If our leaders truly live our values, then our team will be just fine.

Lexy Franklin - CEO at Sidebar

Before starting the company, I was taught culture is built in all the collective little decisions a team makes every day. It is true. Our culture at Sidebar is really the sum part of all of the individual decisions we make; what we chose to prioritize, how we run meetings, the speed at which we accomplish tasks, how we learn from each other.

At Sidebar we build culture in three distinct ways:

Firstly, we constantly communicate. The more our team is talking to each other the better. We spend a lot of time talking to each other. Secondly, we hold ourselves accountable. We are not a culture of blame at Sidebar and we do take accountability. And thirdly, we solve problems with diverse perspective.

The Sidebar team is also inspired by our community and the lives of our members. We’re constantly sharing their stories and celebrating their successes, which inspires us to continue to innovate on their behalf.

Sidebar members come from all walks of life, and all sorts of backgrounds — they are startup founders, senior leaders, CEOs, Oscar winners, and Olympians – but all share important attributes: an incredible growth mindset, a demonstrated track record of success, and an ability to embrace the constant change that comes with rapid progress success.

Rubber, meet road

All this talk of culture though, is not just for shits and giggles. It’s for performance also. Studies show that companies over the last ~25 years that has strong culture outperformed the market — by a lot.

It’s not surprising. A good culture gives you the ability to hire great people. And when you hire those great people, and place them in a good culture, magic happens. But seriously, think about it: better retention, higher productivity, more innovation, increased collaboration. It’s a no-brainer.

Jennifer Phan, Co-Founder and CEO at Passionfroot

Ultimately, the core values you set as a founder dictate the direction your company is headed. My co-founder and I spent time narrowing down the four ideals we wanted our culture to embody. And then… we built our team around them. We base our hiring, assessing performance and how we work & communicate with each other around our values.

We know how we work at Passionfroot and we maintain a 'Manual of Me' that captures details like our personality type, when we’re the most productive, and how we prefer to receive feedback. Recognizing that everyone has different working and communication styles has been instrumental in bringing out the best in each other.

We also acknowledge each other constantly. Even though we work on very different aspects of Passionfroot, we make it a point to champion each other’s success and hard work. This not only makes us feel valued but also creates a safe space to bring more ideas to the table. We celebrate these successes publicly in our #wins Slack channel, building a sense of community and shared achievement.

Michael Batko - CEO at Startmate

We celebrate weirdness. I am the first one to bring my idiosyncrasies to work. You are encouraged to bring your full self to work as it is so much more fun to just be yourself and not put on a fake persona. Our culture naturally evolves through everyone bringing their full self and the unpredictability of it is the beauty of the workplace you’re creating.

The biggest learning here was that we’ve always been remote-first, but in-person interactions are crucial to build a strong trust culture. We’ve leaned into that quickly and fly the whole team to the same location every quarter. What we learned through our off-sites that the time in between of sessions and unstructured social activities are more important than the strategy sessions. These are the times that the team remembers fondly and allows to build the deepest cross-team connections. What doesn’t work? Remote birthdays. We’ve tried it in a couple of different formats, but they just don’t compare to a real celebration. Rather than doing a lacklustre effort, lean into in person celebrations.

Ananda Aisola - COO and Co-Founder of Composer

When we started Composer we were extremely intentional with the type of company that we wanted to build. In fact the first thing that we ‘shipped’ was our values. We’d all worked in dysfunctional organizations and we didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes now that we were founders ourselves.

Culture boils down to three things: who you hire, fire and promote. In making decisions around promotion it isn’t enough just to be a strong performer; you also need to be a force multiplier which is embedded in our cultural values.

The first 20 hires especially have a huge influence on the organization and what shape it takes. For this reason we have not only a high ‘skill’ bar for our hires but also lean heavily upon reference checks and interviews to ensure fit. Not to say we haven’t made mistakes in this area but we’ve course corrected quickly.

Bill Kerr - Founder & CEO at Athyna

Firstly, I'd like to go back a step and talk about brand. Brand is step one in order to build a great culture. You need to know inside and out what you want to stand for. How you want people to behave. Values. Mission. Vision. Motto. Impact. And then the aesthetic part of your brand that follows.

One small culture tip is to share the details of new hires before they start in your comms channels. We do this because making a move is hard.

You are leaving a place you are comfortable for the unknown. We try to minimise that by the entire team being given the option to reach out and say hello. Usually a good number of the team reach out and every member of their incoming team. The result is amazing.

In sum

So there you have it folks. If you, like me, worship at the alter of the engagement survey, then I hope this piece gave you some ideas to go out and execute on.

Annnnd if not, well, you can go ahead and delete my number. Thanks for reading!

Extra reading

• Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't - January, 2014

• How to create a supportive company culture that isn’t just for looks - September, 2021

• HR’s Complete Guide To Company Culture - February, 2024

And that’s it! You can also find all of our original interviews with all the founders and leaders above here.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Noah Kagan, is one of the internet’s original gangsters, employee #30 at Facebook, and later going on to found App Sumo. He recently did a viral launch of his new book Million Dollar Weekend and did some cool testing prior to going live.

And I am throwing this one in because I found it fascinating. I wonder what we believe today that will be proven to be utter garbage in the future.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Notion. We use Notion for everything. Literally everything. It’s most important tool in our stack.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it from me. See you next week. 🫡