Founder-Market Fit

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Here’s the good news: there is nothing you need other than yourself to start figuring out how to define your culture. Every culture starts at the top, and usually with the founders, the people who create the basis for the business in the first place. Whether we like it or not, culture comes from the top. In a small startup the “top” isn’t literally always one person; it’s how the originating founding team models behavior. And remember, this is the one thing you want to stay consistent on, which means it has to be modeled from day one and it has to be something you genuinely believe in for it to take root.

This is a truth a lot of founders feel uncomfortable with, but you’d better get used to it: it comes from you. Go look around at companies with strong founders and CEOs of one culture versus another, and tell me whether the culture reflects them. It won’t take you long to figure out that it comes from the top. The founding team is responsible for defining the culture, and it is not something you can reverse-engineer. Don’t think you can drop a culture into a company two years in because you suddenly realize it’s important. By then you’ll already have defined your culture, because you’ll have been living it and hiring people into it for two years. That’s why culture is such a foundation of the business.

So the starting point is you. What do you, as a founder, uniquely bring? What are the things that are non-negotiable to you? Those personal convictions are the seed of an authentic culture, because culture is really about what you live and do, not what you say. If it’s authentic and comes from the heart, you’ll be able to live it every day. Pulling a value statement off Google because it sounds cool will not work if you can’t live it.