Does a company's culture take care of itself as long as the company is winning?

Harry Stebbings · published Aug 18, 2025

Nik Storonsky argues you shouldn't think about culture but about winning, because growth and development are the biggest determinant of human happiness and winning best positions people to grow, develop and accumulate wealth

Winning creates the conditions for growth and development, and share price appreciation delivers the wealth accumulation people also want

42:47 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Harry Stebbings · published Aug 18, 2025

If a company is winning, everyone in it will be happy; there are almost no places that lose day in, day out and are blissfully happy

43:26 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Harry Stebbings · published Sep 19, 2025

Good culture comes from winning — teams are rarely unhappy when they are winning, learning and getting richer

People want to be on a winning team, and winning delivers learning and wealth simultaneously

46:36 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

Jesse Zhang · published Sep 19, 2025

Managing stress is not what matters for team happiness; what matters is whether the work feels meaningful and whether people get joy from hitting milestones

Decagon takes inspiration from Revolut's winning-team model and deliberately celebrates growth milestones company-wide

Scope: Decagon's wins are mostly growth milestones

47:02 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

Harry Stebbings · published Nov 21, 2025

Culture is largely bullshit and leaders should focus only on winning, because the biggest determinant of human happiness is personal development, which follows from winning

When a company is winning, employees grow in skills and personally and win financially, so everything else follows

8:33 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

Mike Duboe · published Feb 15, 2023

Growth does not solve all problems — it can mask them, and there are always second-order effects and subsequent hills to climb, so teams should be deliberate and strive for control rather than growth at all cost

Growth conceals rather than resolves underlying issues, which resurface as second-order effects

Scope: a belief he held five years ago and has since abandoned

45:19 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Jason James · published Aug 29, 2025

The only thing that matters for company culture is business growth; culture becomes a topic of concern precisely when growth slows

In a fast-growing business people tolerate cultural problems because they see a path to more comp, progression and scope; when growth stalls people worry about their seat and it turns political and slow

40:53 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi

Max Altman · published Nov 21, 2025

Sales and growth cure everything at a company, but that same effect can mask other problems that go unaddressed

At Zenefits sales were off the charts, the culture was great and everyone was happy — but when sales cure all ailments you may stop paying attention to what else is going on

Scope: both sides held: growth is curative and also a blind spot

7:30 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

Paul Graham · published Nov 2020

As a successful startup grows, its original independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted, causing the company to get worse and leaving founders more able to speak freely with other founders than with their own employees.

Founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded, but conventional-minded people greatly outnumber them in the hiring pool.

Scope: successful startups

source How to Think for Yourself

Dharmesh Shah · published Jun 13, 2022

Every company has a culture whether or not it was deliberately designed, and absent intentional intervention a company's culture will degrade

They feared HubSpot was becoming one of those big companies that brings in management consultants to produce fancy words, rather than staying practical and customer-focused

Scope: his interpretation after talking people off the ledge

14:37 20VC: Hubspot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah on The 3 Risks All Startups Face, Angel Investing Rules; No Founder Meetings and No Due Diligence, SMB vs Enterprise; Lessons on Pricing, Distribution and Why You Should Resist Going Enterprise

Jason James · published Aug 29, 2025

A small ongoing investment in culture — such as opening meetings by praising good work — is worth it even in high-growth companies

You never know when ripping growth becomes slow growth becomes no growth, and goodwill in the bank from people who like each other retains them

42:39 Small ongoing culture investment hedges against eventual slowdown

Dharmesh Shah · published Jun 13, 2022

Culture is a product, and roughly 95% of the product-management mindset can be applied directly to building culture

You would never build a product without asking customers what they want or letting them report bugs, so you should ask employees what they want from the culture and what is blocking them

13:17 Culture should be managed with product management practices like feedback loops

Raaz Herzberg · published Dec 12, 2025

Calling culture bullshit is a semantic dodge — culture just is the way things get done and the type of people who work at the company, and nothing matters more than the team

You end up with a lot of people in the company and you need people of a specific type, so the type of people you have is what matters

50:10 Culture is not noise it is who you hire and how work gets done

Paul Graham · published Nov 2020

Founders can delay the loss of independent-mindedness as startups grow by consciously hiring only independent-minded people, who also have better ideas.

The decline is an open problem but hiring selection postpones it and yields better ideas as a side benefit.

source Hiring only independent minded people can delay though not solve the dilution of independent mindedness as a startup scales

Paul Graham · published Nov 2020 · hedged

The most radical remedy is to grow revenues without growing headcount, and the rule about outsourcing non-core work should be extended to outsourcing work done by people who would ruin your culture as employees.

Cheap hires lower the average level of independent-mindedness in a company; growth of staff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect on universities.

source Policies like physically separating teams limit conformism while company wide forums may amplify it