Culture Is Not What You Say — It’s What You Do
The startup culture document — the values statement, the culture deck, the ‘how we work’ page on the careers site — describes the intended culture, which is useful for recruitment and communication. But the actual culture of any organisation is determined by what behaviours the leadership models, what behaviours get rewarded, and what behaviours are tolerated or penalised. The startup that claims to value transparency but where leadership shares information selectively has a transparency deficit regardless of what the culture document says; the one where the CEO shares uncomfortable information openly and expects the same from their team has the transparency culture the document claims.
The startup culture mistake that’s easiest to make and hardest to reverse: tolerating behaviour that contradicts stated values in a high performer. The engineer who produces brilliant code and also dismisses colleagues, monopolises credit, and creates an environment where others feel they can’t speak up is the culture-destroying hire that no individual contribution compensates for. The tolerance of this behaviour signals to everyone else that the stated values are subordinate to individual performance — which is the clearest possible statement about what the actual values are.
The Culture Decisions That Matter Most in the First Year
The first-year startup culture decisions with the most lasting impact: who is hired (each hire is a culture decision — the person’s values, working style, and communication approach will influence the team they join), who is promoted (promotions signal which behaviours the company rewards — the person who gets promoted for hitting goals through shortcuts sends a different signal than the one promoted for hitting goals while bringing colleagues along), and how hard things are handled (the first difficult conversation about performance, the first disagreement at the leadership level, the first customer loss — how these are handled sets the precedent for how hard things are expected to be handled thereafter).
The founder behaviour in the first year that most shapes culture: how the founder treats people when the company is under pressure. The startup that handles a product failure, a key departure, or a missed target with calm, transparency, and constructive problem-solving signals that pressure doesn’t produce different behaviour from the founder; the one where the founder becomes less communicative, more blame-focused, or more controlling under pressure signals that the stated values are conditional. Culture is most clearly revealed and most lastingly shaped by how leadership behaves in difficult moments, not in comfortable ones.
Remote vs In-Person: Making a Deliberate Choice
The decision of whether to operate the startup remotely, in-office, or in a hybrid arrangement is a culture decision as much as an operational one — and the decision should be made deliberately rather than defaulting to whatever is convenient for the current team. Remote-first cultures can build strong cohesion and performance, but they require deliberate investment in the async communication, documentation, and virtual community-building that replaces the incidental connection of shared physical space. In-person cultures benefit from spontaneous collaboration but limit the talent pool to commutable geography and may create exclusion for team members who can’t physically be in the space.
The startup that chooses remote-first and then treats it as an afterthought — minimal documentation, meetings that happen synchronously without accommodation for different time zones, social events that require physical presence — produces a remote culture in name only that generates the disadvantages of remote (no serendipitous interaction) without the advantages (access to global talent, flexibility). The startup that genuinely invests in remote-first infrastructure and practices builds a different and potentially stronger culture than one that treats in-person as the default.
Hiring for Culture Without Creating a Monoculture
The ‘culture fit’ hiring criterion has been justifiably criticised for producing homogeneous teams that all think alike, share the same backgrounds, and systematically exclude candidates who don’t match the profile of the people already hired. The more useful hiring frame: ‘culture contribution’ rather than ‘culture fit’ — does this person bring values and working approaches that are compatible with the team’s core values (honesty, commitment to quality, collaborative problem-solving) while potentially bringing different perspectives, backgrounds, and thinking styles that strengthen the team?
The specific culture elements that must be shared for a team to function well: the values that govern how people treat each other and approach their work (honesty, accountability, respect, commitment to quality), the fundamental working norms (how decisions are made, how disagreements are expressed and resolved, what the expectations around communication and availability are). The elements that benefit from diversity: problem-solving approaches, background experiences, communication styles, risk tolerance, and the creative inputs that come from different ways of seeing the world. Hiring for the former while welcoming diversity in the latter produces a culture that’s both cohesive and creative.
Scaling Culture Without Diluting It
The startup that has a strong, distinctive culture at 15 people faces a specific challenge when hiring to 50 and then to 100: the people who created the culture through shared experience and direct relationship with the founders represent a smaller and smaller fraction of the total team as growth continues. The culture transmission mechanisms that were informal and effective at 15 people — osmosis through observation, direct example from leadership — don’t reach the new team members who didn’t join when the culture was being established.
The culture scaling practices that work: explicit culture documentation that goes beyond values to behavioural examples (not ‘we value direct feedback’ but ‘when you disagree with a colleague’s decision, you tell them directly and privately before raising it elsewhere — and this is an expectation, not optional’), onboarding that specifically socialises new team members into the culture’s most important norms with real examples and sometimes with founder involvement, and the deliberate maintenance of the rituals and practices that reinforce culture as the team grows (the all-hands format, the recognition practices, the way decisions get made).