Back
Culture is what your team does when nobody's watching. Ten years in, we've learned that the culture you ship is the culture you reinforce — not the culture you print on a wall.
Hire for standards, not style
We've made every hiring mistake you can imagine. The pattern across the hires that worked: high taste, high standards, and a bias for shipping real work. Everything else — background, seniority, tools they like — is negotiable.
Write it down
If your culture lives only in conversations, it decays as soon as you hire past five people. Writing things down forces the team to agree on what actually matters, and gives new hires a way in that doesn't depend on being in the right room at the right time.
It also forces the founders to be honest. A lot of 'culture' is just preferences we haven't examined yet — writing them down surfaces the contradictions fast.
Defend it in the moments that matter
Culture is reinforced by what you reward and what you tolerate. The decisions that shape it most aren't the big announcements — they're the small moments when someone cuts a corner or raises a standard, and everyone watches how leadership responds.
