How to Build a Company Culture (and Not Just Avoid “Fucking it Up”)

There’s a famous Medium blog post by Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, called “Don’t Fuck Up the Culture.” In it, he writes:

After we closed our Series C with Peter Thiel in 2012, we invited him to our office. This was late last year, and we were in the Berlin room showing him various metrics. Midway through the conversation, I asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us.

He replied, “Don’t fuck up the culture.”

Solid advice, to be sure. But before you can fuck up the culture, you have to build it. So how do you do that?

Plant the seeds with founder alignment

What’s important to understand about culture is that it is like a garden. It is going to develop and grow whether you cultivate it or not. The question is what you want growing. Flowers or weeds?

The simplest definition of culture is how things get done in your company. In the early days, this reflects the founders’ beliefs about how things should get done. That’s why it’s essential to ensure that founders align on core values.

For example, will you share information widely or keep it need-to-know? Will you be inclusive in decision-making or top-down? Will you build an organization on trust or fear? Will you seek to control or to empower? Will you win at all costs?

Guide growth with codification

Once you achieve founder alignment, you should codify your culture by defining it and writing it down.

Many believe that this means writing a list of 5–10 values on your career page. That’s not it. Culture is multidimensional. Like a chair, it has four legs:

1. Values: Core beliefs that stand the test of time.
2. Rules of engagement: Customs for how people should treat each other.
3. Leadership principles: Behaviors and traits you expect your leaders to express and embody.
4. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI): Organizational design to combat harmful bias in society.

Codifying culture can be daunting. Fortunately, it’s both easier and more effective if you involve your entire team.

When we were 15 people at BenchSci, we defined our five core values: Focused Advancement with Speed, Tenacity, and Transparency (FASTT). We didn’t do this through a leadership offsite or by hiring an outside agency or consultant. Instead, we surveyed and held one-on-one conversations with our team to get their perspective on our culture. We also looked at ten companies with cultures that we admire and listed their values. These two activities allowed us to define our core values.

At around 30 people, we followed a similar process to define our five rules of engagement: Respond instead of react, radical candor, seek to understand first, check your ego at the door, and response-ability. When we started hiring more managers, we also defined our 14 leadership principles.

We defined the final piece, DEI, when we hit 70 people. Looking back, we should have focused on this earlier. We assumed that being a team of four immigrants (three from racialized communities), DEI would come naturally. But that isn’t how it works.

Nurture development with concrete actions

Codifying your culture is the first step but certainly not the last. Writing down your ideal culture doesn’t mean your organization’s actual culture will align with the vision. You need to ensure your ideals are ingrained in everything you do, reflected in rituals, and celebrated. Here are a few things that we do at BenchSc:

• Screen candidates for value alignment
• Maintain a culture deck, share it with every candidate, and make it a part of our onboarding
• Integrate our values into performance reviews and promotion processes
• Hold lunch and learns on topics that reflect our values and culture
• Provide culture awards
• Incorporate culture emojis in Slack
• Provide transparency — for example, we share investor decks with the entire company, give all team members access to our KPI dashboard, and share my 360 with everyone
• Give everyone a learning and development budget
• Maintain a kudos channel on Slack for people to kudos each other
• Set up Donut chats to encourage relationship building
• Hold company-wide town halls and ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions
• Send all managers a copy of Radical Candor
• Provide benefits aligned to our culture; since we’re in healthcare, we give unique benefits focused on physical and mental health
• Enforce an equitable compensation philosophy
• Run a meaningful CSR program
• Part ways fast with people that aren’t a good value fit

I could go on and on. The key takeaway is to think about your culture first and then align your processes, rituals, and even tools to reinforce the culture you’re trying to build.

Keep culture on track — it never ends

These steps will help you codify your culture and integrate it into your day-to-day operations. But as Peter Thiel noted, that’s not enough. For companies scaling fast and doubling their team each year, it’s crucial to remember his advice: don’t fuck up the culture. Many examples exist of companies that started well and became toxic (Uber, Away, WeWork, Theranos, and more).

The best advice I got on this topic was from our principal engineer. He said that when you’re scaling fast, you have different generations of team members. Some have been here from day one, and some just joined. They joined for different reasons and, depending on their timing, joined effectively different companies.

That’s why you must continuously engage with your team about your culture thoughtfully and intentionally. At BenchSci, we do this through “culture renovation” — not “culture transformation,” as many like to call it. Imagine your culture was like a house; it can be beautiful with a solid foundation, but you still have to maintain it, replace some pipes, paint some walls, replace the roof, and so on. If you built it right, you don’t need to knock it down. You just need to maintain and improve it constantly. This process has worked so well for us that we decided to move away from engagement surveys.

Those are some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about culture leading a fast-growing startup. Another is that you need to be constantly learning and experimenting. So what are some of the best ways you’ve seen to build culture? And which company’s culture do you admire most? Please share your thoughts in the comments.