What Startups Get Wrong About Building Company Culture
Culture isn’t a ping pong table or unlimited PTO. It’s not a list of values on your website. It’s not what you say your company is like, it’s what your company is actually like, especially when things get hard.
Culture is built through decisions, not declarations. And the small decisions, how feedback is delivered, who gets credit, how conflict is handled, what behavior is tolerated from high performers, shape the culture far more than any all hands talk or core values exercise.
Here’s what we see startups get wrong most often.
Waiting too long to be intentional. Culture forms whether you’re paying attention to it or not. The norms that get established in the first 5-10 employees tend to stick around long past when they’re useful. If the founding team works 60 hour weeks and never takes vacations, that becomes the expectation, and it shapes who thrives and who doesn’t for years.
Confusing perks with culture. Benefits and perks are part of the employee experience, but they’re not culture. You can have unlimited PTO and a deeply dysfunctional culture. You can have a modest benefits package and a remarkably healthy one. Don’t conflate what you offer with how you operate.
Protecting bad behavior from high performers. This is one of the most corrosive things that can happen to a growing company. When someone is a top contributor but treats their colleagues badly, and leadership looks the other way, the message to the rest of the team is unmistakable: results matter more than how you treat people. The best people, the ones who have options, will start to leave.
Not defining what psychological safety actually looks like in practice. It’s not enough to say people should feel safe to speak up. What does that mean in a meeting? When someone disagrees with the founder? When a project is off track? The behaviors have to be modeled, not just stated.
Being too slow to address culture problems. Culture problems don’t age well. A toxic dynamic, an unresolved conflict, a pattern of behavior that’s eating away at trust, these compound over time. Addressing them early is almost always easier than addressing them after they’ve calcified.
The good news is that if you’re intentional early, you can build something genuinely strong. Culture is not mysterious. It’s a set of norms, behaviors, and practices that either get shaped deliberately or by default.
→ If you’re building a team and want to be more deliberate about the culture you’re creating, I’d love to have that conversation. It’s one of the most important things you’ll ever do for your business.