Culture First Stages — Not Only Luck

Yesterday, I wrote a more lengthy post about “culture first culture.” Since I posted it last night, I’ve updated it substantially today with new thoughts and edits. Company culture is on my mind a lot this year as we are growing our headcount.

In the process of making edits to the post today, I found it helpful to think about the stages of a “culture first culture.” I included the following section among the edits to yesterday’s post and am re-posting it tonight to elicit your thoughts on these stages:

Co-Founder Selection: The biggest early culture setting event is the selection of co-founders and how the co-founder relationship kicks off.
Handful of People: Early attention to culture is not very actionable. At this stage, the main actions are how the handful of people are able to motivate and inspire each other to build better stuff and sell more of it. But paying attention to culture is also not very costly. It is easy to write out the first draft of a profile describing people you want to hire into your business. Pardot’s values are nice and worked well for them – it’s a good place to start. At least you’ll have a notion of what you want, and you’ll be able to iterate later on as the startup grows.
Growing Headcount: Once the headcount starts to grow, the importance of paying attention to culture increases dramatically. The startup now begins to have some freedom from constraints and luxury to hire more selectively. Culture control is essential for scaling the organization so that the principles of its success remain strong at all levels of the organization.

How have you noticed the importance of attention to culture changing during different stages of your startup?

Related articles