For early stage founders who want to set up a strong company culture:
1/ Be consistent about your decision making. Someone said culture is how people behave when their managers are not around. In early stage startups, the founder constantly makes small and large decisions; over time, how the founder thinks and makes decisions becomes a big part of the company’s early culture (“What would Jane do in this situation?”)
2/ Don’t be shy about creating a specific brand of culture that you embrace as the founder. If you’re an engineering founder and most familiar and comfortable with an engineering team culture, stick with it and use it across the company. Ask everyone to be on 2 week sprints and use Jira. Some people may not like it, but when the company is 7 people, you can’t try to please everyone. In the same philosophy, don’t copy good culture practices from big companies and piece them together to create a Franken-culture.
3/ Listen to your people. Sure, so much of a startup’s culture is defined by the founder(s). But this doesn’t mean you can’t ask, incorporate feedback and improve. Ask people what companies they admire the most and why, or what was one cultural aspect they liked the most in their previous company, people will go crazy and share so much valuable insights.
4/ Memorialize in writing. This makes a night and day difference. Give something that people can point to and share. Doesn’t have to be a fancy 100+ page deck like Netflix’s; can just be a few bullet points on your company’s online wiki or onboarding deck (“The way we work”).