by Kent Height
“Founders obsess over product-market fit - then let culture happen by accident. That’s not a blind spot, it’s a ticking time bomb.”
Let’s talk about something that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet but determines whether you’ll ever make it to Series B: your culture.
You spend hours perfecting your pitch, refining your product, chasing down customers. But how much time have you spent designing your culture? Not managing it. Not reacting to it. Designing it – like you would your roadmap or onboarding flow.
Because here’s the truth: every company has a culture. The only question is whether yours is intentional or accidental. And if it’s accidental, you’re already paying the price. In lost time. In slow decisions. In missed hires. In burnout.
Culture isn’t about perks. It’s not about mandatory after-work drinks or awkward icebreakers at team-wide all-hands meetings. It’s the unseen operating system that runs your company. And if you don’t upgrade it early, it will crash – right when you’re trying to scale.
48%
of tech employees report feeling overworked, with remote work blurring boundaries between personal and professional lives.
Culture Is Strategy Wearing a Hoodie
Let’s get one thing clear: culture isn’t the soft stuff. It’s the stuff that makes everything else work. It’s how your team executes. How they make decisions. How they treat each other when the pressure’s on.
Startups don’t die from bad ideas – they die from internal friction, misalignment, and slow execution. All of that? Culture.
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Culture dictates whether your best engineers stay or walk.
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It affects how fast you onboard, ship, and respond to change.
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It determines whether your team shares problems early – or hide them until they explode.
For remote and hybrid teams, the stakes are even higher. You don’t have serendipity on your side. If your culture isn’t deliberately engineered, it defaults to silence and disengagement.
“Company culture is the backbone of any successful organization”
Gary Vaynerchuk
VaynerMedia
What Culture Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Culture isn’t a set of values on a wall. It’s how your company behaves when nobody’s watching. It’s the unwritten rules. The everyday decisions. The habits that form when you’re too busy to pay attention.
Ask yourself:
How do decisions really get made?
How is feedback given—and received?
Who gets rewarded, promoted, or burned out?
That’s your culture. Whether you meant to build it or not.
Startups often create culture by accident. A founder’s personality becomes gospel. First hires model behaviour. Habits calcify. Then you scale and things start breaking. People feel disconnected. Decisions get slower. You wonder why it all feels harder than it used to.
The Scaling Trap: Culture Drift
You start with a tight, mission-driven team. Alignment is high. Communication is easy. But as you hire fast, especially remotely – you lose cohesion. The culture thins out. Trust erodes. Execution slows.
That’s what happened at GitHub Copilot. The launch of AI-assisted coding tools was revolutionary, but it also led to a 40% increase in code churn. Why? Because without shared norms, new tools create chaos. More features. More changes. Less clarity. Culture wasn’t keeping up with innovation.
Or take Hopin. The breakout remote-first event platform scaled at lightspeed (thanks in no small part to a global pandemic and dispersed teams across the planet), but found that maintaining team connection was getting harder. Their solution? A dedicated “Vibe Team” just to engineer engagement and belonging across time zones. That’s culture as infrastructure.
Culture as a Retention and Growth Lever
Let’s be blunt: your culture is your talent moat. In an industry where every good hire has 10 offers and an endless stream of recruitment consultants banging at the door with offers of more (of everything), culture is what tips the scale.
Buffer leaned into radical transparency: publishing employee salaries, opening up revenue dashboards, and sharing company metrics in real time. This wasn’t a branding move – it was a structural shift. In 2013, Buffer made all salaries public, including the formula used to calculate them. That decision alone led to a 229% increase in job applications and massive global press attention.
But transparency wasn’t without discomfort. In the early days, some employees worried about judgment or resentment. However, as trust grew, so did alignment. With everyone on the same page, decisions got faster. Teams became more cohesive. And over time, Buffer reported a 75% employee retention rate over five years – far above the industry average.
Transparency became more than a cultural value; it became a competitive edge, helping Buffer build one of the most admired remote-first teams in tech.
Buffer experienced a 229% increase in job applications, indicating that transparency attracted more candidates..
Pleo, a fintech scale-up, isn’t just offering a job – it’s offering a way of working that’s deliberately designed to support high-performance and well-being. Their remote-first model allows employees to work from anywhere in the UK. They’re currently trialling a four-day work week, showing a serious commitment to productivity without burnout. They also invest in personal growth through dedicated development budgets, and make it clear that inclusivity and autonomy are not buzzwords but cultural anchors. These aren’t gestures, they’re strategic decisions that help them attract and retain globally minded talent.
If you think you can’t afford culture? Ask yourself how much bad hires, lost developers, or disengaged managers are costing you.
Pleo is currently trialling a four-day work week while maintaining a remote-first model – proof that culture-led strategies can drive both flexibility and performance.
How to Build a Founder-Led Culture Operating System
Don’t wait for culture to emerge. Build it. Systematically. Here’s how:
Define Decision Norms – Write down how decisions should be made. Consensus? Top-down? Data-led? Be explicit.
Design Feedback Loops – Build a rhythm of retros, 1:1s, and anonymous feedback. Create safety for honesty.
Codify Onboarding – New hires learn your culture in week one. Don’t leave it to chance. Bake your principles into onboarding.
Measure and Adjust – Use tools like Officevibe, Lattice, or even quarterly founder AMAs to keep a pulse on culture health.
Live It Publicly – Founders shape culture by what they do, not what they say. Model the behaviours you want to see – especially under pressure.
Culture doesn’t scale on its own. But if you lead it, you can turn it into your unfair advantage.
The Bottom Line
As a founder, you’re building a product, a team, and a company. But above all, you’re building a system that either supports growth – or sabotages it silently.
Ignore culture, and you’ll feel it in churn, friction, and fatigue.
Design it intentionally, and you’ll create a company where:
Talent wants to stay
Teams move fast
Ideas surface early
Problems get solved collaboratively
Culture isn’t just a vibe. It’s your operating system. And it’s your responsibility to architect it – before it architects you out of business.
Author: Kent Height
Thought leader, growth marketer and consultant to innovative start-ups and scale-ups - Kent is the founder of Techtonic, and a leading voice on successfully scaling businesses with value-driven strategies. Based at Cambridge Science Park in the UK, he helps ambitious organisations cut through the noise to drive real commercial results and audience engagement with impact.
