Building a Strong Company Culture: Advice from Seasoned Entrepreneurs

I advise entrepreneurs not to choose values just because they read or look good on the website. Instead, choose two or three that you are actually willing to build real policies around, because employees figure out the gap between what is stated and what is practiced fast.

For example, during my early career, I worked in a company that was growing fast but still in the startup phase. They chose “trust and empowerment” along with “accountability” as two of their core values. An unlimited sick leave policy was one of the clearest tests of this. Most leaders hesitate to offer a policy like this, afraid of it being misused, but it worked. If you’re telling people you trust them, this is one of the most direct ways to actually show it to them.

The policy itself was the easy part. Getting managers to actually model it was where the real work came in. It took a proper induction to explain why the policy existed, and then a whole separate program for managers focused on leading by example. We had to back it up with coaching just to make sure their own behavior lined up with what we were asking of everyone else.

It mostly worked. Of course, there were a few who took advantage of the policy, but we dealt with those individuals directly instead of punishing the whole team by removing the policy entirely.

You usually find out if a company value is real right then. Just watch what happens the first time someone puts it to the test.

The advice I keep coming back to is don’t let “informal” substitute for “intentional.” Early on, culture feels like something that just happens if you hire good people and stay friendly; you don’t need a handbook when everyone fits in one room. That’s true right up until it isn’t. We let onboarding stay loose for far too long, figuring new hires would pick things up by osmosis the way the first few did. What actually happened was every new hire cost us weeks of ramp time we didn’t notice; we were paying the same questions asked over and over, expectations that differed depending on which manager explained them, senior people re-teaching basics instead of handing off real ownership.

The principle I’d prioritize now, and wish I’d prioritized sooner, is that culture is a system you design, not a vibe you protect. Values on a wall don’t do anything. What does the work do? It is deciding, on purpose, how decisions get made, how ownership gets handed off, and how a new person goes from confused to trusted and holding that steady as headcount grows and “everyone already knows” stops being true. Once we actually built that structure, the impact showed up as speed. People reached real ownership faster, managers got hours back in their week, and a lot of the inconsistency that used to quietly erode trust between teams eased off. If there’s a single line I’d leave a first-time founder with, culture is whatever your onboarding teaches people to do when no one’s watching.

The single piece of advice I’d give is this: don’t confuse culture with perks.

When we started building Nika Finance as a three-person team, I made a deliberate choice to optimize for execution density instead of processes or benefits. Culture at an early stage is not about ping-pong tables or unlimited PTO. It’s about who makes decisions, how fast those decisions become real work, and whether everyone on the team is doing the work or just talking about it.

We have no separate functions for product, growth, or marketing. All three of us are builders. When a user reports an issue, the person who reads it is often the person who fixes it. That feedback loop runs in days, not quarters, because the decision-making layer and the execution layer are the same layer. That’s the culture.

I’ve watched crypto teams raise capital, hire aggressively, and then spend months in alignment meetings while their product sits static. The bloat pattern is predictable: raise a large round, build a v1, then burn the rest of the capital on the run-up to a token event that primarily benefits insiders. Headcount scales to match that capital burn, not the actual product surface.

We deliberately chose an angel round over venture capital because the venture model in crypto has become optimized for token-exit timing, not product timing. That structural choice forced us to stay lean, which forced us to route instead of building everything ourselves. We route perpetuals through Hyperliquid via builder codes and prediction markets through Polymarket. That lets us ship five product lines with three people because our internal engineering surface is narrower than what users see.

The impact has been speed. We ship faster than teams several times our size. You cannot build a world-class product with a slow organization. You must be relentless. The teams that win are the ones that stay closest to users and ship faster than everyone else.

Culture in the early stage is ownership and alignment, not perks. If your team is lean, everyone is accountable. If everyone is accountable, the work moves. That’s it.

My advice to a first-time entrepreneur is to decide how people should behave when something goes wrong. Company culture is easy to describe when sales are growing and the work is going well. You see the real culture when a deadline slips, a client is unhappy, or someone makes an expensive mistake.

In building my consulting business and leading R&D teams, I have focused on honesty, ownership, respect, and speaking up early. I want people to bring forward bad news while there is still time to act. Hiding a problem to avoid an uncomfortable conversation usually makes the damage much worse.

Leaders set this standard through their own reactions. If an employee reports a mistake and the first response is blame, the next mistake may stay hidden. I start by asking what happened, what needs to be contained, and what we should change so it does not happen again. Accountability still matters, but it should lead to better work rather than fear.

I also believe people should be able to question an idea regardless of job title. In scientific and technical work, the person closest to the process may see a risk that leadership has missed. Giving that person a real voice has helped us catch issues earlier, avoid repeated work, and make better decisions.

The business impact has been practical. Problems surface sooner, clients receive honest updates, and teams spend less time protecting themselves. Trust also makes people more willing to share ideas and take responsibility for the result.

Entrepreneurs often try to define culture with a list of values. Employees pay more attention to what the founder rewards, tolerates, and does under pressure. That becomes the culture.

I’ve always run lean with fewer than 10 people. I started the company in 2002. My advice is to communicate big and make decisions small. By that I mean, have written onboarding materials, even if you’re just hiring one person. Create a consistent, respectful way to voice concerns and share feedback. Really try to set a professional tone with performance expectations, even when it feels a bit like overkill.

Making decisions small means acting fast on small problems. For example, if you have a small team and inadvertently hire someone who causes stress, deal with it immediately. A 100-person shop can absorb one bad attitude or habit; a two-person shop gets measurably hurt by that one person.

After 24 years, I’ve prioritized consistent communication. I know and have experienced most changes in a business, so I have a plan and expectations I can clearly communicate to new hires and consultants. This has helped in determining the best fit for most roles and has nearly eliminated the need to make quick changes in the middle of projects.

The advice worth giving first-time entrepreneurs is to define culture by what you tolerate, not what you aspire to. Most founding teams write values statements that describe who they want to be. Culture gets set by what actually happens when those values are tested — when a deadline creates pressure to cut corners, when a difficult conversation gets avoided, when someone performs well on output but poorly on how they treat people. The gap between stated values and tolerated behavior is where culture actually lives.

The principles that shaped things most were clarity about how decisions get made and directness about problems when they’re small. Both sound simple, and neither happens automatically. Decision clarity means people don’t have to guess who owns a call or wait for permission they shouldn’t need. Directness about problems early means issues get addressed before they become resentments or recurring failures.

The business impact was most visible in retention. People stay in environments where they feel respected, heard, and clear on what’s expected of them. Culture that delivers those things doesn’t require perks to compensate for it.

My advice about building culture would be this: Don’t be afraid to experiment. Try stuff out… but give things long enough to actually work.

I say that as someone who doesn’t always follow my own advice!

I love trying new stuff. New ways of working, new tech, new products, new approaches. That curiosity has been a huge part of creating my company, Brainfood.

The danger is that entrepreneurs are naturally attracted to the next shiny thing. I know I am.

You try something for a few weeks, don’t see an immediate result and think, “Right, that didn’t work. What’s next?”

But sometimes it wasn’t a bad idea. You just didn’t give it enough time.

So one of the values I’ve tried to build into Brainfood is a mixture of experimentation & consistency.

Try things. Test them. Get feedback. Change what isn’t working.

But don’t keep changing direction so quickly that nobody knows what you stand for.

The other principle that has always mattered to me is being useful.

Our strapline is “Learning That Works”, and I genuinely use that as a test.

Does this actually help someone?

Will they use it in the real world?

Does it make their job, their team or their organisation better?

If not, why are we doing it?

That has shaped everything from the way I design training to the people I work with and the way we treat clients.

And I think that’s what culture really is.

It isn’t the values written on a wall.

It’s the stuff you repeatedly do, particularly when nobody is reminding you to do it.

So experiment and be curious by all means.

Change things when the evidence tells you to.

But once you find something worth doing, be consistent enough to discover whether it actually works.

I’m still learning that last bit myself.

It’s important to be very clear and consistent on your mission and values. Communicate them regularly and clearly. Your business strategy and day-to-day decisions should line up with them, as that ensures that everyone understands what is happening and why. This alignment helps give them a clear idea of how their work fits into things.

Culture is not only about purpose, though: it’s about how you want to work. Our business has peak and off times. Sometimes these cycles take place in months, sometimes just weeks. Case in point was during the World Cup. It was 100% clear, without even saying it, that when some key matches were on there would be people who weren’t in the office, let alone online, and that’s perfectly OK. Not everyone will have the same investment in the business, even though they’re invested in its success. Recognizing that my own way of working will not work for everyone else helps build a culture in which all different investment and skill levels are respected and channeled in a way that helps realize their potential.

Culture isn’t the values you write down; it’s the behaviour you’re willing to excuse when someone is delivering results. My advice to first-time entrepreneurs is to decide early what is non-negotiable, because culture is really tested when a strong performer crosses the line. I tend to come back to three things: respect, accountability and consistency. Those values only mean something if they apply to everyone, including the people who are hardest to challenge.

People pay far more attention to what leaders reward, correct or ignore than to what appears in a values document. That affects how colleagues treat each other and how comfortable they feel raising problems early. If the exception becomes acceptable, it quickly becomes the standard. For me, that’s the real lesson: culture is built through everyday decisions and consequences, not statements on a wall.

You can’t successfully build a workplace culture of ownership while holding the wheel.

Ask a founder what they want in an employee, and they’d most likely tell you they want proactive people. Someone who takes initiative. But many employers, even if they find exactly the kind of people they’re looking for, still want to check on everything, review every decision, and even sit on calls that don’t need them.

I was guilty of the same thing when I was starting out.

Told myself it was for quality control, but now I realize it was all an excuse. I had not fully let go yet, and those people I hired sensed it. If their boss was going to step in and have the final say anyway, why bother making the call themselves?

Now, for the advice. I have two. The first would be to be careful who you bring in because your first hires will set the tone for your company, like it or not.

Secondly, and probably most important: once you’ve hired them, trust them with real responsibilities. Give them the freedom to carry out tasks that really matter. You’d be surprised at how people can rise to the occasion if you believe in them and support them enough.

If I could tell first-time founders one thing, it’s this: Stop copying other people! It’s easy to watch a hundred YouTube videos, read a stack of books, and try to build the culture someone else built. Mentorship helps, but always remember that you’re building your company, not theirs.

When I was shaping my company’s culture and ethos, I kept coming back to two pillars that actually mattered to what I was building: empathy and passion. Not some buzzwords that sound good on every careers page, but the things I genuinely wanted the people around me to share. That clarity took time to arrive at, and honestly, it’s still evolving.

Then it went into hiring. Every interview now has a section for empathy and passion, and it comes before the portfolio. Your core team becomes your culture carriers, so if you get those hires right, the rest of the culture builds itself. That’s how our values grew from a few honest conversations into something closer to a real ideology. We established sixteen principles of our own, the same way Amazon has its sixteen.

So my advice to you is an exercise: Sit with yourself and journal it out until you find your own answer. What actually matters to you, in your company, with your people. Once you know that, build around it, because that’s what will hold up. The ten books just got you to the desk.

As a founder and recovering corporate leader, the biggest game-changer in influencing company culture is practicing what you preach.

I firmly believe the people who work alongside me are humans, not output machines. They have lives, families and bad days just like me. So I try to avoid asking them to do too much outside work hours, encourage them to take vacations to recharge, and honor their bodies when they don’t feel well.

But for them to do that, I have to set those boundaries for myself as well. If I’m burning myself out, not showing up for them (or showing up late) or talking to myself negatively, that’s my company culture. For me, that looks like honoring my family time, exercising to reduce my stress, and getting away when I have a chance to decompress so I can show up as the best leader with fresh ideas.

This isn’t something I learned from great leaders in my career; it’s something I had to learn myself after a lot of trial and error on what kind of leader I wanted to be.

And when I started investing in my team as the humans they are, it returned with the respect and work output 10-fold. One example: we offer unlimited vacation time but set a minimum number of vacation days to use instead of defaulting to “unlimited.” Research shows employees with unlimited vacation actually take fewer days off, because without a clear allocation, people feel anxious about appearing lazy or overburdening their colleagues. I want my team to gain new experiences and bring those back to better our company, and setting that minimum permitted them to actually do it.

Lastly, when you invest in your people, their lives and their potential, your customers feel that, your potential hires feel that, your employees stay, and ultimately your business grows because of it.

Start from assessing your personal values, then develop the principles for your work culture. Keep things simple by having few mission-centric objectives which contribute to the day-to-day operations and overall culture among staff. Refrain from following trends by copying what other companies are doing; this method immediately erodes your company’s message and significance in the market. If people can’t relate to the culture, it eventually becomes very challenging for people to focus on their roles, produce quality work, and work well with others.

Do not embellish, because I’ve seen company cultures that inflate their worth when in fact the “crafted” company culture is solely a feel-good ideology versus an implemented value in the organization’s DNA. Good people work with good people, which demands some reflection on what attracts such workers to bring their best to work.