When I was the Chief of Staff at Bowery, I used to think often about company culture. Part of it was the role. I joined as the 15th employee, but we doubled within 6 months and then again in another 6. Over the course of my first few years there, we rewrote our values, instituted levels and pay ranges and updated them multiple times as we grew, added OKRs and other methods of measurement, built out the leadership team, changed the leadership, faced real losses and achieved major wins - all things that influence a company culture. We even accidentally imported another company culture for a period of time through concentrated hiring.

I read so much about company culture in the past, whether it was Ben Thompson’s “culture is ultimate scalable technology” or reading about culturally defining moments like AirBnB’s early resilience, or hearing from friends at companies where company culture seemed to get in the way of success. I told myself that when I started a company I would write down my values and work on company culture from Day 1, because that’s the easiest time to influence your culture.

And I did! But when you start a company, you soon realize that although company culture is absolutely a force multiplier at some point, it is often formalized or codified in hindsight, and can’t really be engineered from the beginning.

The reason is that a company’s culture almost always is very simply a reflection of the founder’s actions, accumulated over time. That’s it.

This is even true at a large scale of hundreds of employees. Sure, others on the leadership team influence culture too, but if you’ve ever started a business or operated close to founders, it becomes very clear that it near impossible to replicate the outsized cultural influence of the founder. It’s the same driver of why we see former founders often come back to companies to “right the ship.”

It seems very simple, but it’s the truth. Actions, aggregated over time, turn into implicit values, principles and ways of working, regardless of whether they are codified formally. Encapsulating those principles into “values” on a website can be a way of disseminating culture more quickly, but even those are facsimiles for how one observes their colleagues act once they’re working.

One truism I’ve observed to this effect is that when you are an employee at a company, repeating the things you say can often be perceived as inflexibility or a leading indicator of lack of trust. Whereas repeating yourself or certain concepts as a leader or CEO ends up being culture. In fact, I would argue that it is your job as CEO to repeat yourself ad nauseam, because it is your job to align every single person around a specific strategy and north star, and most people do not fully internalize information until they have heard it multiple times, or it is part of company culture and becomes almost second nature.

After years of operating and founding, my feelings about the importance of company culture remain the same, but my approach to building it has become more simple and streamlined. Founders do not need to spend time early on articulating culture. Act with intentionality and in accordance with your values. If you model how you’d like everyone else to act, and the rest will follow. It’s easier said than done!

Side note: this phenomenon can be very intoxicating as a founder. Your DNA is in every fiber of the business, and so it can sometimes be alarming when it doesn’t appear the way you expect, or it metastasizes into something you don’t recognize. But back to the axiom above, a diverted culture can also be rerouted via the founders own actions.