How do you build a company culture as a founder?

That is how culture gets built in a young company. Not in an offsite, and not on a values page, but in a few dozen small habits that new people see up close and copy. This post is about which habits matter most, and how to choose them on purpose.

What is company culture in a startup, really?

It’s what people learn to do when nobody is telling them what to do. In a company of five or ten people, that is mostly learned from you.

Big companies have handbooks, processes and layers of managers that all send signals about how things work. A start-up has very few of those. What it has instead is the founder, in every meeting, on every thread, making most of the calls. So the culture is, for a while, a close copy of the founder’s working habits.

That is good news and bad news. The good news is that you can shape it directly, because you are the main source. The bad news is that you’re shaping it all the time, including on the days you’re tired, rushed or avoiding something.

Why do your habits matter more than your values?

Because new hires believe what they see over what they’re told. If your values say “we speak up” and the last person who disagreed with you in a meeting got a short reply, the team learns the reply, not the value.

There is also research suggesting the early pattern sticks. The Stanford Project on Emerging Companies followed technology start-ups in Silicon Valley from their early days. In a summary of the findings in California Management Review, James Baron and Michael Hannan describe five distinct “blueprints” that founders used for managing people when they launched, and report that companies which changed their blueprint later paid for it in higher turnover and weaker performance. They conclude that “changes in human resource models are extremely destabilizing”.

A later Stanford GSB article on the follow-up study puts it more starkly. It reports that firms which at some point altered the founder’s blueprint were “three times more likely to fail” than those that kept their original model. Hannan’s advice to founders is direct: “Once systems get coded, they’re hard and risky to change.”

That research is about how founders set up the way they manage people, which is wider than any single habit. But the lesson carries over. What you set up early, often without thinking about it, is what the company inherits. Hannan also notes that business plans tend to have “20 pages on the product, and a paragraph about employee relations”. Most founders spend their attention the same way.

What are your first hires learning from you?

More than you think, and usually in five areas. At Coach42 we use our own five dimensions to describe the culture a founder’s habits are teaching:

• Pace: how fast things are expected to move, and what happens to rest, focus and quality along the way.
• Candour: whether people say what they really think, including to you, and how quickly hard news travels.
• Autonomy: which decisions people make on their own, and which ones they learn to bring to you.
• Craft: what “good enough” means, and whether people see care rewarded or speed rewarded.
• Customer focus: whose problem comes first when there isn’t time for everything.

None of these has a right answer. A company can be fast and careful, or slower and very precise, and both can work. The point isn’t to score well on all five. It’s to know which way your habits are pushing, so the culture you get is the one you’d pick.

Are your habits teaching people to speak up or stay quiet?

Candour is usually the dimension founders overestimate in themselves. You may feel open to challenge. Your team may feel it’s safer not to.

The signals are small. You answer a concern with a reason why it’s fine, rather than a question. You share the good news from a customer call and keep the awkward part to yourself. You give feedback in a private message weeks later, or not at all. Each one teaches your first hires a rule about what gets said out loud.

The habit that helps most is going first. Say the uncomfortable thing about your own work before you ask anyone else to. Tell the team when you were wrong, in plain words, soon after you notice. And when someone disagrees with you in a meeting, thank them before you answer. If you find hard conversations are the ones you put off, our post on why managers avoid difficult conversations applies to founders just as much.

Who decides: you, or the people you hired?

Your first hires learn how much autonomy they have from the first few decisions they try to make. If you quietly redo one of them, they learn to check with you first, and they keep checking long after you wish they wouldn’t.

Founders hold on to decisions for understandable reasons. You know the product best. You can see the whole picture. Each call takes you seconds. But every decision that has to come back to you teaches the team that the real work happens at the top, and it adds to the weight you carry. We call that weight Founder Load, and decisions are usually the easiest part of it to put down.

The fix is to be explicit early. Pick one type of decision, such as small spending, a supplier choice or how to handle a customer complaint, and say it belongs to someone else, with a limit. Then let their call stand even when you’d have made it differently. The first decision you leave alone teaches more than any message about trust.

Are you rewarding speed or care?

Pace and craft pull against each other in most start-ups, and your habits show which one wins. Your team watches what you praise, what you send back and what you let go.

If you celebrate the feature that shipped in two days and never mention the bug it caused, the team learns that speed is what counts. If you rewrite every document before it goes out, they learn that nothing they do is quite good enough, and they stop trying to get it right first time. Neither is wrong as a deliberate choice. Both are a problem when they happen by accident.

A useful habit is to say the standard out loud before work starts. “Rough is fine, I just need it by Thursday” and “This one goes to the investor, so let’s get it right” are both clear. Your hires can work with either. What they can’t work with is guessing.

Whose problem comes first?

Customer focus shows up in how you spend your own time when everything is urgent. If a customer email sits while you fix an internal slide, your team notices. If you drop everything for one loud customer and ignore the quiet ones, they notice that too.

Early on, you are often the person closest to customers. That makes your habits here especially easy to copy. When you share what a customer said, word for word, in the team channel, people learn that customers matter. When you only bring customers up when something has gone wrong, they learn that customers are a source of trouble.

What does this look like in a real fortnight?

Here’s a hypothetical example. A founder runs a software company with six people. She’s well liked, works hard and cares about the team. Here’s an ordinary fortnight.

• Day two: she messages the team at eleven at night with a new idea and a request to “look at it first thing”. Two people reply within the hour. (Pace.)
• Day four: in the weekly meeting, a new hire says a launch date looks too tight. The founder explains why it’ll be fine and moves on. Nobody else raises it. (Candour.)
• Day six: an engineer picks a tool for a small internal job. The founder swaps it for the one she prefers, without saying why. (Autonomy.)
• Day nine: a draft of the customer guide goes out with a few rough edges. She doesn’t comment on it, but she rewrites a sales email line by line. (Craft.)
• Day twelve: a small customer asks for help setting up. The request waits three days while the team prepares for a meeting with a potential investor. (Customer focus.)

Nothing here is a disaster. She didn’t do anything unkind. But in two weeks her first hires learned that late-night replies are expected, that raising a concern doesn’t change much, that small calls get redone, that some work matters more than others for reasons nobody says, and that investors come before small customers. When they hire the next people, that is what they’ll pass on.

The fix isn’t a values workshop. It’s five small moves: send late ideas in the morning, ask the new hire what date she’d suggest, let the engineer’s tool stand, say which documents need polish before work starts, and give the small customer an answer the same day.

Can you change your company culture later?

Yes, but it costs more the longer you leave it. Early habits get copied, then taught to the next people, then written into how things are done.

The Stanford research is a useful warning here. Its findings point to the risk of changing a founder’s early model for managing people once a company is under way. In the GSB article, Hannan warns: “You don’t want to find you’ve backed your way into something without realizing it.” The cheapest time to choose your culture is while the team is still small enough to see every habit.

That doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It means you should change one thing at a time, say out loud that you’re changing it, and keep it up long enough for people to believe it. A habit you change for a week and then drop teaches the team that nothing really changes.

What culture are your habits creating?

Most founders have one habit that sends a much louder signal than the rest. Knowing which one tells you where to start.

The First Ten Hires is a free self-test built for exactly this. It takes about 5 minutes, needs no sign-up, and your answers stay in your browser. You answer 14 questions about your own everyday habits, and you get a culture fingerprint across the five dimensions: pace, candour, autonomy, craft and customer focus. For each one it shows what your habits are teaching new hires, then picks out your strongest signal and one move to try this week. You can read more about how it works on the test page.

The fingerprint isn’t a verdict on you or a grade for your company. It’s a picture of what your habits are teaching right now, so you can keep what you like and change the rest on purpose.

If you want a wider read on how you lead, including how often you say what you really think to someone senior, try The 42 Test. And if you started the company with someone else, the Co-Founder Check is worth doing together, because two founders teach two sets of habits. You’ll find the other tests and posts for this stage on the founders page.

You don’t build a company culture once. You build it every day, in the reply you send, the question you ask and the decision you leave alone. Start with the habit your first hires are copying most.