How should a company define and maintain its stated values?

Amjad Masad · published Mar 10, 2023

A stated value is only meaningful if reasonable people could disagree with it and the opposite position is also reasonable

If the opposite of a value is something nobody would hold, the value cancels itself out and says nothing; 'move fast and break things' works because 'move slow and break nothing' is a real value at a company like IBM

14:16 20VC: Why AI Will Lead to Thousands of Billionaires and Elon Musk's, Will TikTok Be Banned and How Facebook Should Be Investing in AI & Why Startups Have Become Too Soft; We Need a Spiritual Reform with Amjad Masad, Founder & CEO @ Replit

Akin Babayigit · published Jun 26, 2023

Most mission and vision statements are meaningless to employees and exist only because someone said the company had to have one

Facebook's mission — give people the power to build community and bring the world closer — is something he genuinely can't parse, and no employee gets up in the morning to elevate the world's consciousness; statements most employees think are bullshit serve no purpose

Scope: not arguing for abolishing them; they can serve a purpose if articulated well and honestly, e.g. Tripledot's non-fluffy 'world's leading data-driven entertainment company'

30:58 20VC: Eight Pieces of Startup Advice that are BS: Why You Do Not Have to Love Your Space, It Is Ok To Do It For The Money, Focus Is Not Everything, Speed Is Not The Most Important Thing with Akin Babayigit, Co-Founder @ Tripledot Studios

Harry Stebbings · published Aug 14, 2024

'Integrity' cannot function as a company value

No one would ever want a low-integrity person, so the opposite position is not one anyone would hold

44:22 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify

Harry Stebbings · published Sep 18, 2024 · hedged

Values are weak when you can't plausibly take the other side — e.g., no one would ask for 'nasty and indirect,' so 'kind and direct' may not be a real value

No one would ask for someone nasty and indirect, so 'kind and direct' isn't discriminating; by contrast his team screens for obsession rather than mere passion, which is a real bar

11:56 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari

Emilie Choi · published Aug 23, 2021

Jeff Weiner's religious focus on the culture — outlining the mission, vision, strategy and culture — is one of the most important lessons worth drawing on as a leader

It lets every employee see how their work contributes to the overall mission even during rapid growth; Coinbase ties its strategic pillars and OKRs to increasing economic freedom in the world

6:43 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C

Brad Gerstner · published Oct 10, 2022

Values only take hold through repetition — doing something once is a gimmick, twice a curiosity, but threading it into your life makes it a value

Their annual family service trips only became meaningful to his kids through repeated commitment over years

54:38 20VC: Altimeter's Brad Gerstner on Why Supercycles and the Powerlaw is the Most Important Thing In Investing, Why Portfolio Diversification is the Opposite of Risk Mitigation and The #1 Question Brad Asks All New Recruits

Ilir Sela · published Aug 4, 2023

The most important lesson in management communication is frequency — the same message must be repeated far past the point where it feels redundant, and if you feel nauseous repeating it you should say it once more

There is no communication debt in a small early team, but as the company scales things get lost in translation

Scope: especially as the company scales

19:30 20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela

Patrick Forquer · published May 11, 2026

Maintaining culture at scale requires deliberate repetition of values, highlighting what good looks like, and constant reinforcement of expectations

Culture doesn't hold on its own as headcount grows; you have to be intentional and living the standards

Scope: framed around Legora's LFG values (lean in, grow together, fight for excellence)

59:27 20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

Linda Lian · published Apr 1, 2021

A good value is a fundamental primitive the whole team and leadership can align on; generic-sounding wording is fine as long as it is applied to specific situations

You can wordsmith values endlessly, but what matters is having a shared primitive that gets invoked concretely, as 'strive for simplicity' is when a group has debated for an hour without deciding

11:45 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom

Harry Stebbings · published Jan 5, 2026

'How you do anything is how you do everything' is wrong — you have to pick your battles and choose where to be all in

Not every task or role warrants full intensity

11:58 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy

Alan Chang · published Jan 5, 2026

'Never settle' should be applied selectively: identify the most important roles in the company and never settle there, but it is perfectly acceptable to settle on roles that matter less

You have to pick your battles

12:33 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy

Max Junestrand · published Aug 15, 2025

The only way for a young founder to set pace is leading by example, and people hired to be winners accept that building something generational requires sacrifice

His cofounder Sigge sets the pace by coding in the office while Max travels, and the CRM makes top performers' output visible to everyone

Scope: especially as a young founder

55:37 20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand

Max Junestrand · published Aug 15, 2025

To be a leader who inspires people you must lead by doing — carrying the hardest work yourself — because if people see that you care, they care

When you are deep in founder mode, people see the effort and mirror it; he did this by carrying the highest sales quota himself and then by working hardest on product and marketing

77:03 20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand

Nikesh Arora · published Jun 22, 2026

Companies take on the personal attributes of their founder or CEO, so a company's cultural values closely mirror the leader's own values.

The organization is trying to please the founder because it has figured out that emulating what the leader rewards — impatience, ambition, exactingness — is the path to success there.

Scope: works in both directions: right values propagate, wrong values also propagate

65:22 20VC: Nikesh Arora on the Frontier Model Problem: Breadth vs Depth | The Future of Token Costs | Memory Becoming the Moat | Where Value Accrues: Infra, Models, or Apps? | Why Enterprise AI is Not Ready & Systems of Record vs Systems of Intelligence

Linda Lian · published Apr 1, 2021

Values should be living and changeable — a value that sounds great on paper but is never invoked in practice should be swapped for one the team actually uses

Values that don't show up in day-to-day language aren't doing work; Common Room is currently considering changing two of theirs for this reason

9:42 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom

Alan Chang · published Jan 5, 2026

A company should have exactly one cultural value, and his is 'never settle' — six values, as Revolut had, is too many

With too many values he cannot even remember them all

11:39 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy

Linda Lian · published Apr 1, 2021

Values need to exist from the very beginning of a company because they level the playing field between employees and executives and give the organization a voice

Values provide a framework for conversation and debate that lets people advocate without competing on authority, seniority or experience, which improves decision quality as well as culture

7:26 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom

Immad Akhund · published May 12, 2025

Founders should write down their company culture attributes when the team is only three or four people, and those attributes must involve real trade-offs

Mercury wrote down six attributes on day one, built interview questions against them, and kept a cohesive culture at nearly a thousand people — it is very hard to do this later

Scope: attributes must be ones with genuine costs, e.g. hiring for humility means passing on high-ego successful execs

55:34 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Jeff Lawson · published Jun 28, 2021

Most of the employee experience at a company is local — day-to-day interaction with one's team and manager — so leadership impact comes from the shared operating principles, not from all-hands speeches or company-wide emails.

The lived experience of most people is their daily work with their immediate team, so what dictates that experience is the shared principles used to navigate goals, decisions and accountability.

20:40 Leadership impact flows through local team operating principles not top down speeches

Fabien Pinckaers · published Feb 12, 2025

Culture comes down to autonomy, responsibility and evolution — and most companies claim these without actually delivering them

60:20 Autonomy responsibility and evolution are cultures real components most firms only claim them

Des Traynor · published Nov 15, 2023 · hedged

Managing people is probably not the same as it was five years ago and differs generationally, but one level up the task is timeless: design a culture that attracts the most talent and motivates them to work as hard as possible for the climate, environment and country you're in.

62:45 Culture design is timeless though specific management tactics evolve generationally

Akshay Kothari · published Sep 18, 2024

The 'direct' half of 'kind and direct' carries real signal because it explicitly invites people to debate internally rather than just be nice to each other

Directness is an invitation to internal debate, which is a distinct behavioral ask beyond niceness

12:25 Directness as a value signals genuine invitation to internal debate

Craig Courtemanche · published Dec 4, 2023

Culture must be built intentionally, which means hiring to your values rather than only for skills

Candidates have already demonstrated the skill set to even enter the interview process, so the real hurdle is whether they live and value the company's values

38:58 Culture is built through values based hiring not only skill screening

Craig Courtemanche · published Dec 4, 2023

Once a culture is genuinely set through values-based hiring, the organization itself maintains it and the CEO is no longer the keeper of culture

Like angular momentum — if someone slips through the hiring filters and isn't a fit, the teams eject them because they can't survive in the culture

39:53 Self sustaining culture after solid values based hiring means the ceo neednt police it

Daniel Ek · published Mar 8, 2021

The hardest and highest-leverage part of leading a company at scale is telling a story that genuinely connects with thousands of employees from all walks of life without sounding like platitudes

If you can harness that energy and make everyone feel the mission is the most important in the world and that they contribute to it, you will see mountains moved

42:27 Storytelling that genuinely connects with every employee is the hardest and highest leverage leadership skill at scale

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 20, 2019

Effective implementation of values-based hiring and firing requires that leaders evaluate how to incorporate and reinforce values (and associated behaviors) into every employee touchpoint.

source Leaders must embed values into every employee touchpoint

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 20, 2019

Peer-to-peer kudos should be required to cite a specific behavior exemplifying a company value, which trains employees to think in terms of values.

Tying every kudo to a value trains employees to interpret actions and behaviors through values

source Peer kudos must cite a specific value behavior to train values thinking

Gokul Rajaram · published Aug 20, 2019

Companies should add a mandatory Values section to performance reviews and promotion packets, despite the extra work.

Reviews focus almost exclusively on business metrics, and people pay extra-close attention to things that affect their reviews and promotions

source Mandatory values section in reviews and promotion packets despite extra work