Building a Startup Culture: 5 Core Values to Win

Number 5 is also called “Don’t Be Stupid”

If you build a culture, you must also consider the consequences that your values might have years later. Image generated with Leonardo AI

Great startups don’t just happen — they are built on principles that guide every decision. Strong company values can be its greatest strength or its biggest weakness. Good values, well communicated, become a machine for revenue and for happy customers. Bad values, or the absence of values at all, results in chaos.

A startup is a human endeavor which is created to help other humans in a marketplace. As such, it needs some structure to help it operate. Culture is that structure. As Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, put it like this: “Culture is what remains after you subtract out the people.” Values are guiding principles that help make decisions when the boss is not in the room.

I saw culture-building firsthand during the year I spent as a climate risk modeler at Axa Climate. It is essentially a 200-person startup operating within a large insurance group. During my time there, they changed there mission from “helping businesses adapt to climate change” to “make regenerative universal.” As a reflection of this, their culture is rooted in regenerative business.

This is quite a challenging choice; entire volumes of books have been written about regenerative business, and the resulting culture is rather complex…