When should we write down our values?

Around 15-25 employees. Before then the culture is small enough to be transmitted by proximity to the founders. After 25, new hires no longer work directly with founders daily and need written artifacts. Waiting until 100+ means you're documenting whatever accreted, not shaping it.

How do we tell if our culture is healthy?

Signals: retention of high performers, willingness of employees to disagree with leadership publicly, referral rate of open roles, ease of onboarding new hires. Warning signs: high performers leaving within 18 months, decisions constantly reopened, hiring bar quietly lowered, all-hands questions dry up.

Can culture be changed after it's set?

Yes, but it takes 12-24 months of consistent behavioral change from leadership, usually accompanied by some departures of people who were fit for the old culture and not the new. Culture change announcements without behavior change from the top are a waste of everyone's time.

Startup Company Culture: How to Build and Preserve It (2026)

Culture isn't values on a wall. It's the pattern of behaviors that get rewarded, tolerated, and punished.

Company Culture: The Behaviors You Reward and Tolerate Are the Culture You Have

Every company has a culture — whether it was designed or accreted. Culture is not the values document; it is the pattern of behaviors that the company rewards, tolerates, and punishes over time. Values documents matter only insofar as they change what leaders reward and tolerate. The gap between stated values and observed behavior is where cynicism grows, and once cynicism sets in it takes years to unwind.

Culture is set in the first 20 hires

The behaviors, work ethic, and standards of your first 20 hires become the template that hires 21-200 are measured against. If early hires ship fast, argue directly, and take ownership, later hires who don't will feel out of place and self-select out. If early hires avoid conflict, wait for direction, and blame others, the opposite happens. This is why the first 20 hiring decisions are disproportionately important — and why lowering the bar early is one of the most expensive mistakes founders make.

Values that actually work

Values documents work when they are: specific (not 'be excellent' but 'we ship every week'), used in hiring decisions (candidates are explicitly evaluated against them), used in performance decisions (people who violate them are performance-managed even if they hit numbers), and modeled by leadership visibly. Values that appear only on the careers page and in onboarding decks have negative value — they signal to employees that leadership says one thing and does another.

The 'brilliant jerk' decision

Every company eventually has a top performer who systematically violates the stated values — bullies peers, hoards information, takes credit, blames others. The decision of whether to keep them, coach them, or remove them is the single most visible culture signal leadership sends. Keeping them tells the org that hitting numbers overrides values. Removing them (transparently) tells the org that values are load-bearing. Every high-performing culture we've studied has made this call at least once, publicly.

Preserving culture through hypergrowth

Culture dilutes at ~2x employee growth per year. Preserving it requires: (1) structured onboarding that transmits values, not just processes, (2) hiring managers being trained on culture assessment, not delegating it, (3) leadership spending disproportionate time with new hires in the first 90 days, (4) written artifacts (culture doc, decision principles, examples of behavior) that scale beyond word-of-mouth. Companies that grow from 50 to 500 in 24 months without any of these lose their culture — reliably.

Remote and hybrid culture

Culture in remote-first companies is transmitted primarily through written artifacts and asynchronous interactions rather than proximity. This means the docs must be better, the leadership communication more frequent and more transparent, and the deliberate sync moments (offsites, all-hands, video calls with cameras on) more purposeful. Remote culture is not weaker than in-person culture — it is different, and requires different investment.

Frequently asked questions

When should we write down our values?: Around 15-25 employees. Before then the culture is small enough to be transmitted by proximity to the founders. After 25, new hires no longer work directly with founders daily and need written artifacts. Waiting until 100+ means you're documenting whatever accreted, not shaping it.
How do we tell if our culture is healthy?: Signals: retention of high performers, willingness of employees to disagree with leadership publicly, referral rate of open roles, ease of onboarding new hires. Warning signs: high performers leaving within 18 months, decisions constantly reopened, hiring bar quietly lowered, all-hands questions dry up.
Can culture be changed after it's set?: Yes, but it takes 12-24 months of consistent behavioral change from leadership, usually accompanied by some departures of people who were fit for the old culture and not the new. Culture change announcements without behavior change from the top are a waste of everyone's time.