Setting the Company Culture: An Operating Manual for Founders
Some thoughts on how to intentionally set a scalable & timeless company culture as a founder (notes to myself).
Every founder I know has a notion page somewhere with their company values written down. Most of them are useless. “We value transparency, collaboration, and excellence.” Cool. So does literally every other company that has ever existed. That tells me nothing about how your company actually works.
This post is my attempt to build something I can actually use when I start my next company. Think of it more like an operating manual.
(I’m a HUGE F1 fan, so gonna use some F1 analogies to explain my thought process here, please bear with me).
TLDR: The Framework
Choose your archetype. The Factory model (eg: Google; freedom to fail, outsized wins), the Pitcrew model (eg: Netflix; sports team, low margin for error), or the Amphibious model (eg: Open AI; hybrid). Pick based on what your company needs.
Lay the universal foundations. Psychological safety, dependability, clarity, meaning (the Patient Story), impact. Non-negotiable regardless of archetype.
Define your authentic layer. What’s actually true to you as a founder? What are you deliberately not optimizing for?
Propagate relentlessly. Hire in line with it, incentivise it, tell the story, make it visible. Culture decisions made early stick for years.
Where This Came From
Three conversations over the past few weeks sharpened my thinking on this.
First: Sebastien Dabdoub, a software engineer who’s worked at Google, Netflix, and OpenAI, in that order. The man basically speedran the culture spectrum.
Second: a talk at South Park Commons by a partner who’s been a founder and operator across eight companies.
Third: Siddharth Seth, founder of Pavo AI, who’s living this problem right now in real time.
Phase 1: What Kind of Company Are You?
Most founders never explicitly choose a culture. They just drift into whatever the first five employees vibe with, and then keep fixing when things feel off at 20+ people.
Sebastien broke it down into three archetypes, and I haven’t found a cleaner way to think about it:
The Factory model (eg. Google): fail until you don’t. You can take wild bets, fail nine times, and nobody panics. Because when the tenth bet works, you get Waymo or DeepMind. It’s how F1 teams come up with breakthroughs for their cars back at Brackley or Maranello. This generally works if you have a cash cow (Google has Search) bankrolling the experimentation. Without that, you’re just failing with no safety net.
Google also cracked something nobody else has replicated: keeping people who could easily go start their own companies. They let engineers spend one day per week working on whatever they wanted, on company time. If there was some outrageous success, they would compensate them proportionally. It worked. People who were rich enough to retire and talented enough to start anything stayed for years.
The Pitcrew model (eg. Netflix): perform or get cut. Sports team culture. You’re on the roster because you’re excellent. The moment you stop being excellent, you’re off. This produces insanely efficient teams. But Netflix will never build a Waymo. The culture can’t support high-failure-rate innovation with long time horizons. You’re trading ceiling for floor.
(Worth noting: Netflix isn’t innovation-free. They built and open-sourced the streaming framework the entire industry uses. But all their innovation happens within a tight strategic frame. Every word in their strategy document is stress-tested. If it’s not in the strategy, it doesn’t happen. Pitcrews in F1 will innovate to the world’s end to save every 0.1 second possible. But they can’t fundamentally alter the dynamics of it such that you gain an insurmountable advantage over competitor cars.)
The Amphibious model (eg. Open AI): lab + product engine. The research lab part of Open AI runs like Google: long timelines, high failure tolerance, because the wins are civilization-level. Their product team runs like Netflix: ship, optimize, grow, no excuses.
Two operating systems, one company. Someone has to manage the seam.
I saw this playing out at Pavo AI. Siddharth has a PhD-led science team and a product/engineering team under the same roof. The scientists work in deep focused bursts; their “deliverables” are breakthroughs that might take months. You can’t sprint-plan your way to a novel insight. Meanwhile, the product team needs to ship fast and continuously. Completely different rhythms. Siddharth is the bridge between both, and his job is making sure neither side resents the other for operating differently.
If you’re building an AI company in 2026, there’s a decent chance you’ll need to solve this exact problem.
Important: choose before you hire. If you don’t, the culture defaults to whatever emerges accidentally. And accidental culture is how you end up with a 15-person company that feels like a group project where half the team didn’t read the brief.
Phase 2: The Universal Foundations
Whatever archetype you pick, if you’re building an innovation company (you probably are), there’s a bedrock layer that applies to every innovation company.
Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams and found five things that predicted success:
1. Psychological Safety
Can the most junior person in the room tell the most senior person they’re wrong? Not a “well, maybe we could perhaps consider...” but a “I have data, you’re wrong, here’s what I’d do instead.”
People always bring up the supposed counterexamples. Steve Jobs called people’s work garbage. Musk is... Musk. Jensen Huang talks about torturing people to greatness.
But I’d argue that they’re the strongest evidence for the point. Each one of these leaders care about radical truth. The best idea wins regardless of who said it. A junior engineer at SpaceX who finds a better structural solution gets heard. People in these companies compete to surface the right answer. That IS psychological safety. It’s just wrapped in intensity.
The culture fails when people keep quiet, especially because speaking up carries political risk. It kills companies, and it’s fairly common tbh. It starts with you. Admit when you’re wrong, out loud. Reward the person who pushes back on you with better data.
2. Dependability
If you say you’ll do something, do it. If you can’t, say so immediately. Not at the deadline, or the day after. Because the cost of getting this wrong is cognitive load (apart from obviously missing the deliverable deadline). When I hand something off and know you’ve got it, my brain lets go. When I’m not sure, I’m carrying that weight on top of my own work. Multiply that across 10 people and you’ve got a company running at half speed while looking busy.
3. Clarity
Everyone needs to know what direction they’re paddling. Not once. Constantly.
Founders always underestimate this because they made the decision and have been marinating in it for weeks (I’ve personally made this mistake). It feels obvious. Meanwhile, if you ask your 12-person team what the top two priorities are, you’ll get eight different answers. You think you’re a dragon boat pulling in formation when in reality, you’re barely even afloat.
Over-communicate. You will feel like it’s too much. It’s not. It’s barely enough.
4. Meaning (the Patient Story)
Everyone on your team could go get a comfortable job tomorrow. They’re with you because of the mission.
Best example I heard: a cancer diagnostics company that opened every all-hands with a patient story. Not revenue. Not metrics. A patient who was alive because of their work. The chief medical officer would show scans. Before <> after. Tumor <> then no tumor. People still get chills years later.
You might think your B2B SaaS doesn’t have patient stories. Find the human story anyway. If you’re saving someone three hours a day, you’re giving them evenings with their kids. That counts. Lean into it. Humanise your company! (even more important in this post-modern sci-fi AI slop era).
5. Impact
People need to feel and understand how their specific contribution matters to the above. Not just “great mission” in the abstract, but “the thing I built last week directly caused this.” Make that connection visible. Don’t let great work disappear into the void.
Phase 3: The Part That’s Authentically Just You
Universal foundations are table stakes. On top of them, you build something authentic to who you actually are.
If your culture isn’t a genuine reflection of how you operate, it won’t survive the first hard quarter. People detect inauthenticity fast.
Zuckerberg built “move fast and break things” because that’s who he is. Engineers checking in code by day two. That would be insane at a medical device company. But it built Facebook.
Tesla/SpaceX is hardcore intensity. Authentic to Elon. Not replicable by people who aren’t Elon, and that’s fine.
Judith Faulkner at Epic Systems put “Do not go public. Do not be acquired. Be frugal.” on the wall. Very Midwestern. Very deliberate. Epic is one of the most valuable private companies on earth today.
GitLab went fully remote because everyone was remote when they started. They then leaned into it and turned it into an advantage.
Some choices are mutually exclusive. “Move fast and break things” can’t coexist with “zero defects.” If you want wild experimentation, you can’t also demand nothing ever breaks. The sign that you’ve made a real cultural choice is that you can articulate what you’re giving up.
Start with yourself. What do you value? How do you work best? What drives you crazy? Your personal values are the seed. Not all of them should make it into the company (some you should hire against), but the core should feel natural. Because if it doesn’t fit you, you’ll either exhaust yourself pretending, or the mask slips and trust goes with it.
Here’s an exercise that I’ll do the next time I start a company (I’d recommend you to do this too): Write down what values / working styles / culture ethos are important to you as a person? (Forget about the company for a second). Crystallise them. The company culture & values should be an extension of this.
Phase 4: Making It Stick
Defining culture is maybe 20% of the work. The rest is making actually sticking with it.
Hire explicitly. If your culture is intense, say so in the interview. “We’re here until midnight fixing things and we love it.” Let people who don’t want that opt out before they’re on your team. The rule: if you can’t say a cultural criterion out loud in an interview, it shouldn’t be a criterion. (This also protects you from disguising “people who look like me” as “culture fit.”)
One example that stuck with me: a tech company in Israel hired primarily from the local ultra-orthodox community. Engineers with six or seven kids, not working 9-9-6. But brilliant and hard-working during their hours, and because no other tech company was hiring them, the company had access to a talent pool everyone else was ignoring. There are many ways to build a company.
Reward the right behaviours. Every time someone does what your culture is supposed to produce, call it out. Publicly. Immediately. A Google t-shirt from 2003 is worth more than a designer suit, because you can’t buy one; you had to be there. Mission patches, public acknowledgment, a quick “great call” in standup costs nothing, but matters enormously.
Tell the founding story. Again and again. The origin story encodes your values without feeling like a lecture. Tweak the emphasis to highlight what you want to propagate in terms of your culture & values. If you’ve been at any well-run company, you’ve heard the founding story multiple times. It may feel a bit self-indulgent, I know, but it’s a cultural transmission mechanism doing its job.
Make what matters visible. Qualcomm has a wall of patents in their San Diego HQ. Most important patents get the biggest spots. Walk in that door and you understand in five seconds what the company is about. What’s visible in your Slack, your all-hands, your onboarding? That’s your actual culture. Nobody reads the values doc anyway.
Hire against your own weaknesses. The company will reflect you, good and bad. If you tend to micromanage, or avoid conflict, or make impulsive calls when excited, hire leaders who buffer the team from your worst tendencies. One of the most honest descriptions I heard of a co-founder relationship: “A big part of my job was protecting everyone from the his (the CEO’s) randomizations.” Know what you’re bad at. Hire against it. Give yourself grace; being a founder is one of the hardest jobs in the world!
One More Thing
Gridware introduced “every other Monday off” when they were five people. Today, they are a 140 member team and have gone through multiple growth stages, but this policy has still stuck. Became a core recruiting advantage.
Culture decisions that are made early deliberately stick around way longer than you’d expect.
At some point you’re not in the room for half the conversations. Then most of them. Then almost all of them. What happens in those rooms when you are not present, is your culture. It’s either the operating system you designed, or it’s whatever randomly showed up when you weren’t paying attention.
Make it deliberate.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
💯
enjoying these so much!