The Founders Guide to Culture Building
What it takes to build a high-output team.
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Friends,
Founding a company is an act of divine delusion. It goes against all sound logic, most familial advice, and the demands of your bank account. If it were possible to bundle up ten years of your life and commensurate earnings, the odds suggest you would be better off (much better off, in fact) dumping it on a roulette table and telling the croupier: red or black, you pick.
Every entrepreneur makes this insane wager, a bet with a 90% chance of failure, and among that 10% “success rate” a swathe of Pyrrhic victories: 1x returns, subpar acqui-hires, being swallowed whole by a greedy, boring conglomerate.
But as anyone who has bought a Powerball ticket knows, it is easy to delude ourselves. The right cocktail of dopamine and potential can send even a sober mind into reveries of Loro Piana knitwear.
What is wilder, then, is that we must fool others, too. To get a startup off the ground, let alone scale it, someone else—some credulous or risk-loving soul—must believe in your delusion and accept it as a plausible reality.
This shared belief in the future is the root of company culture. Often, we call it a “dream” rather than a “delusion,” but whatever we name it, it is what binds together a fledgling group and drives them in a common direction. Over the years that follow, this group plays a pivotal role in transforming delusion into reality or ensuring it remains nothing more than a fantasy. More than almost anything else, this group and the culture that unites them decide whether your company ends up among the 90% or the true winners embedded in the 10%.
Our final Founders Guide (at least until Season 2!) hones in on this topic. How do entrepreneurs build and scale high-leverage cultures? What values do they champion? What rituals unite their colleagues?
Below, you’ll find tactical advice, insights, and frameworks from 8 elite founders and CEOs. To access the full article and ensure you’re building a high-performance culture, subscribe to our premium newsletter, Generalist+.
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Tactical Lessons
Be inspired, but don’t imitate. Great cultures stem from the founder’s personality. The result is that an Elon Musk company will differ from one founded by Jeff Bezos simply because of their differing personalities and perspectives. Entrepreneurs should look to legendary firms for inspiration but be wary of adopting their approaches wholesale. For a culture to be authentic, it has to connect to the people driving it.
Use rituals to enforce your values. It is not enough to simply state your company’s principles. You must find ways to embody them through repeated rituals. For example, Front champions its culture of “transparency.” One ritual that puts this principle into practice is for team members to keep their calendars public. Find small ritualistic behaviors that reinforce the culture you want.
Focus on the business. Both Anduril and Retool emphasize the importance of building a culture of focus that is devoid of outside distractions. That means keeping the workplace free of political and cultural discussions that don’t impact the company’s core mission and operations. While organizations have taken different approaches to this question, championing this level of focus is becoming increasingly common at high-output startups.
Keep raising the bar. However high-leverage your startup is, it can always be better. As a CEO or co-founder, your job is to fight complacency, keep raising standards, and reset the bar for what “great” looks like. Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList, describes how he thinks about this problem and the value of “good” stress.
Don’t be afraid to push an update. Culture is a living organism. It may need to change to meet new circumstances. If one of your core values no longer seems to be relevant, or is encouraging unproductive behaviors at scale, revisit it. You may find a value that better meets your current reality.
Previous Founders Guides
This edition marks the end of Season 1 of our “Founders Guide” series. Over the past six months, we’ve created 10 playbooks designed to help our premium members tackle their most important operational questions, including raising funding, hiring exceptional talent, and leveraging modern AI.
If you want to be a more thoughtful founder or operator, subscribe to our premium newsletter, Generalist+, and unlock the full season:
“[W]e like to study the cultures of successful, generational companies like Amazon or Facebook – and that’s a good thing! But I’ve also seen founders go too far…”
Christina Cacioppo, CEO and Co-founder at Vanta
When it comes to culture, I’ve often seen two mistakes:
Adopting the culture of a different company
Holding culture static, when the organization is changing quickly
First, as an industry, we like to study the cultures of successful, generational companies like Amazon or Facebook – and that’s a good thing! But I’ve also seen founders go too far, in effect copying the principles underlying a successful organization onto their own startup. Organ rejection follows: the foreign principles aren’t native to the company, and employees can tell. The principles might as well be written in gibberish for all they’re used day-to-day.
For example, I’d have loved for Vanta to be metrics-driven, but in the early days, we hadn’t instrumented much, and we didn’t trust the numbers we did have. If I had cribbed from Amazon and instituted a “leaders use metrics to drive decisions” principle, we wouldn’t have instantly produced accurate, trustworthy metrics, and I would have lost credibility with the team. For all that founders develop a reputation for manifesting the future, I don’t think blunt force works for culture.
Second, part of what makes hypergrowth companies so fun is their constant change: you’re bringing new products to market and inventing new ways to delight customers. It would be troubling if your product offerings stayed static over time; the same is true for your organization’s culture. “What got you here” brought some success, and it might need change to carry you farther.
At Vanta, we wrote an early principle of “turn every page,” drawing a hopeful parallel between our security and compliance research and Robert Caro’s study of political titans. It reminded us we weren’t experts but could study, synthesize, and invent. But when we grew to 300 Vanta’ns, we realized “turn every page” had taken on a different tenor: it led to long, drawn-out specs that emphasized research but buried results. We showed our work but left the conclusion to the reader, and not everyone enjoyed 600-page tomes. So we removed that principle – to the dismay of the Caro fans at Vanta – and steered the company toward clarity to continue scaling with our customers.
“[W]e’ve occasionally seen a pocket of the company start to act in a way that feels off-brand and misaligned from the company culture.”
Trae Stephens, Executive Chairman and Co-founder at Anduril
Company culture is one of the key contributions that any founder makes to a business. Culture naturally flows from the founder’s personality, and you can see this play out across tech. The culture at Elon companies reflects Elon’s idiosyncrasies, working style, and priorities. Palmer companies mirror Palmer in the same way.
We’ve been very intentional about culture at Anduril. Part of this stems from the fact that our group of co-founders are very comfortable with who we are as people and in relation to one another. The four of us have a great dynamic with each other: we’re very collaborative, we’re driven by our mission of defense and deterrence, we’re highly opinionated, and we are all friends in addition to being business partners. The rest of the company is able to see that and use that to guide their work and interactions with their colleagues.
One specific way that this shows up at Anduril is that our group of co-founders and broader executive team have a culture of debate. We often have differing points of view and encourage deep discussion to narrow in on a final decision. We also are very open to people from across Anduril engaging the co-founders directly in debate, and that ethos is reflected in the dynamics of each team in the company.
An example of this is that we reminded employees over the years that this is a place of business oriented around the core mission of the company, not everyone’s personal political, cultural, or philanthropic interests. That doesn’t mean that people can’t be who they are – it just means that when you’re at work, you’re meant to be focusing on the mission of Anduril. Things important to our employees that are outside of the mission of the company are still encouraged (e.g., we match donations to any non-profit cause an employee selects), but they primarily occur outside of work hours. Over the past five years, this tack went from being unusual in the tech industry to accepted practice. My Founders Fund colleague Mike Solana recently wrote a great article about this shift in Pirate Wires.
We knew from the beginning that defense was a controversial sector, so there would be a lot of ethical conversations that would happen as we expanded our product offering into capabilities that would be traditionally thought of as weapons. Because of that, we have continually made an effort to openly engage about ethics through writing and public discourse. We also decided to design onboarding for new hires to address the ethics of defense so that everyone who joins the company knows exactly what they’re signing up to work on. We go out of our way to be transparent with our employees so they don’t feel surprised by a project we take on.
Since culture stems from the founder, cultural consistency can get harder as companies grow because there’s less contact with the founder for each employee. At Anduril, we’ve occasionally seen a pocket of the company start to act in a way that feels off-brand and misaligned from the company culture. In those instances, you have to work directly with that pocket to get the culture back on track and ensure that you’re continuing to remind the entirety of the company through your own actions how things are meant to play out internally.
“One thing I wish I had done sooner was to be more intentional about the rituals!”
Mathilde Collin, CEO and Co-founder at Front
Building a strong work culture is something that is very important and personal to me. Growing up in France, I was stunned by how commonplace it was for people to complain about their jobs and dread going back to work after the weekend. It was something I didn’t want to accept as an inevitable part of life. If I was going to spend half of my waking hours working, I wanted to like it!
So when my co-founder and I began building Front, we set out to make a difference in people’s professional lives in two ways:
Through our product: building software that enabled our customers to be more productive, informed, and engaged at work, which in turn would delight their customers.
Through our culture: by being intentional and building a work environment where employees could thrive.
In practice, this meant defining our cultural values (care, collaboration, high standards, low ego, and transparency) and then making sure they were infused into the employee experience as of day one. In addition to having our values listed on our jobs page and displayed in our offices, we also dedicate part of the Fronteer onboarding process to an in-depth review of our values and what they mean.
As Front began to grow, I made it a point to dedicate an all-hands to refresh our values. The benefits of scaling also come with some downsides, such as less face-to-face time due to working across time zones. Values enable us to be more deliberate and speed up decision-making. When in doubt, acting according to our values will lead to the right path.
In that meeting, I defined the value (what the value is and is not) and rituals (routines we repeat deliberately to build the habit of living the value). For example, at Front, transparency is to give the full context and explain decisions big and small. It does not mean that we give feedback or our opinion about everything or share confidential information with the outside world. Some rituals include having our calendars be public so that your colleagues know how you’re spending your time; we regularly share our performance metrics and board decks company-wide. Side note: one thing I wish I had done sooner was to be more intentional about the rituals!
We also created some programmatic rituals tied to our culture. We have values-based awards: Fronteer of the Month and Stumble of the Month, which are shared at our company-wide all-hands meetings. For Fronteer of the Month, an employee can nominate a colleague to recognize them for going above and beyond and embodying one of our values. Stumble of the Month (tied to low ego) is a voluntary nomination of oneself to share a mistake that was made so that all employees can benefit from the lessons learned from it.
“[Y]ou need to raise the standard for what ‘great’ looks like in your organization.”
Avlok Kohli, CEO at AngelList
When it comes to building a high-performance culture, it’s always Day One. The beauty of the tech world is that you can strive to be even better. However productive you think your company is, it can still improve.
Because of that, I don’t believe AngelList has reached the highest performance it can. I know there’s another level we can hit. I want us to move even faster than we have over the past few years and hold ourselves to an even higher standard. I look at Elon Musk and the cultures he has built at Tesla and SpaceX and use that as a benchmark. If a founder says, “Yeah, we have this amazing culture,” I want to ask: “Compared to who? How does it track relative to Tesla or SpaceX?” These kinds of comparisons are relative.
I spend a lot of time asking myself: how does AngelList reach that next level? What do we need to do? It’s not about copy-pasting Tesla’s playbook onto AngelList. It has to be authentic to who you are as a leader and the company's identity.
There are a few things that help.