Don't Fuck Up The Culture

After Airbnb founders Brian Chesky & Joe Gebbia closed their Series C with Peter Thiel in 2012, they invited him to their office.

Now I’m no fan of Peter Thiel. But I’ve always thought this bit of wisdom worthy.

Brian & Joe were showing him various metrics. Midway through the conversation, Chesky asked: “What is the single most important piece of advice you have for us?”

Thiel replied: “Don’t fuck up the culture.”

Fucking up the culture - or worse, forgetting to establish it in the first place - is one of the most glaring mistakes I see early-stage startups make. All the time. In many instances, it’s an early warning sign.

Why Founders Forget It

With everything a young company has on its plate: Product development, COGs, funding, cash flow, staffing, operations, yada yada yada, culture seems like some touchy-feely nice-to-have. An HR thing.

It is not.

Core values are critical to everything a business does. Inside. & Out. Full stop.

Culture guides every decision a company makes. Before strategy, policy or a manager ever weighs in.

As a start-up, you might think “I’ll build a culture later after I get funded.”

Do not wait. & do not cut corners.

Build it now. Day one. & live it every day forward.

The Misunderstanding

The power of culture is often misunderstood.

When we talk about corporate culture, we often think about atmosphere.

Is there a foosball table in the break room? Beer on tap?

Or we think of vibes. Does the brand have a cool factor.

In marketing we often talk about Cultural Relevance. Hooking up with the right celebrities. Influencers. Appearing at the buzzy events. Marketing moments.

The Gap’s comeback, for example, leans on Cultural Relevance - a viral ad with K-Pop group Katseye. Gap’s ability to maintain itself as the culture-forward brand depends on its continually launching culturally viral campaigns. That’s a pretty tall order for any marketing team!

None of that is culture. Culture is something else entirely.

Culture is not a trend to watch. A demographic to decode. A vibe to co-opt or imitate. As many believe. & even more get wrong.

It has zero to do with company perks.

& as a brand it is your last unfair advantage.

Great brands don’t follow culture. They create it.

Take Harley-Davidson. Nobody at Harley wrote “outlaw rebellion” into a positioning deck.

Riders did that.

The leather, tattoos, the open road as a middle finger to convention. Harley’s real genius wasn’t inventing the culture. It was having the cojones & discipline to not smooth it out. & then the instinct to own it. & build on it.

It worked so well the “outlaw” motorcycle became the choice of accountants doing weekend rides. & those facing a mid-life crisis.

Culture is how ideas are adopted & accelerated by aligning beliefs into collective decisions. Ideas gain support, build momentum.

What Culture Actually Is

Culture is the shared beliefs, values, customs, identity, traditions, behaviors & artifacts of a group or society. Not a values deck. Not a mood board. Not some laminated plaque that collects dust on your desk.

It’s the invisible force that drives human behavior & shapes decisions from the inside.

Passed down from generation to generation. Acquired through observation & practice.

Our collective families, friends, faith communities, countries – even political associations – are part of our cultural identity.

Culture fosters a sense of belonging among its members.

Culture isn’t change. It’s how – & more importantly why - people respond to change the way they do.

In business, everything you do defines your culture.

Every phone call, text, e-mail, meeting, presentation, pitch deck represents your culture.

It’s manifested in the way you treat your teams. Your vendors. Your customers.

It should never be treated like some jacket you reach for when you’re headed out the door.

Culture builds trust. Momentum. Gets everybody rowing in the same direction. When your entire team “gets it,” they don’t need babysitting.

They are 100% prepared to do the right thing - especially when no one is looking. It’s a belief system so absorbed by the people inside the organization that they act on it without being told to.

I know I refer to Origins a lot (maybe too much), but culture was the essence of Origins. Origins was among the first prestige brands to ban animal testing & animal ingredients.

In the early days of the brand, members of the team self-selected to give up wearing leather. & fur. It felt contrary to the brand’s culture. Except this established behavior was never prescribed. Never said out loud. Never written on a mission statement.

No one said “no leather, no fur” out loud. It was a feeling about what the brand stood for. & just one of the beliefs that made Origins Origins.

The day Origins lost its culture, it was lost.

Culture Eats Strategy

Attributed - or perhaps misattributed - to management guru, Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Or lunch. Quoted both ways.

Or was it Mark Fields? No matter.

The phrase rests on a simple principle: a strong culture can, & often does, outperform a great strategy. Culture is the engine. Strategy provides the roadmap.

If the culture is toxic or unaligned, even the best strategy will fail.

So how do you build a culture worth multiplying?

Define your POV, not your perks. Your culture is not the snacks or the foosball table in the break room. It’s your point of view on how you’ll live up to your promise - to your team, your customers, to each other. Start there.

Decide how you act when the shit hits the fan. Culture prescribed only for good days isn’t culture. That’s marketing. The real test is the Tuesday when funding falls through & the metrics are ugly & nobody’s watching. That’s the day culture actually counts. When it reverts to some CEO terrorizing a team, that’s a toxic culture.

Let it be felt, not framed. The best cultures are rarely written on some laminated plaque. Origins never issued a memo about leather & fur. The team just felt it. If you have to remind people what the culture is, you haven’t built it. You’ve decorated with it.

Hire it before you need it. Every early hire is a disproportionate stake in what your company will become. Five wrong hires & you don’t have a culture problem. You have a culture disaster. One that will come back to bite you in the butt. Big time.

Fire for it too. Nothing torches a culture faster than keeping a top performer who’s also your biggest asshole. You know what they say about one bad apple. It’s true. Everyone’s watching what you tolerate. Tolerance is a value statement whether you meant it as one or not.

Model it at the top. Don’t manage it. Culture isn’t a policy, a Slack channel, or a values deck. It’s a demonstration. What leadership does at 6pm on a Friday IS the culture. I recently worked with a founder on a professed wellness brand promising work, life, balance. Then she proceeded to bombard their creative director with to-do emails while he was on his vacation. Beach time became a bust.

Protect it like a P&L line. Toxic culture will eat your best strategy, your best hires & your best year. Treat it with the same rigor you’d give burn rate.

Why Now

Why does culture matter now more than ever? In an era of AI, it matters most of all.

When machines can generate your strategy, your deck, your copy, your visual expression, culture is one thing that can’t be prompted into existence.

It’s the human competitive advantage that must be built, believed & lived every day.

Person by person. Decision by decision.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Lunch. Or maybe dinner.

Don’t fuck it up.

If you’re a young brand building your culture, happy to help.

Best, Robin