Essential tips to understanding and building culture as a startup scales

This article is from an episode of Matrix Moments by Matrix Partners India, a podcast featuring candid conversations on what it really takes to survive the startup world. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here.

In today’s episode, we cover the importance of inculcating a strong and healthy culture in your company right from the early stages.

Photo credit: Shridhar Gupta

Joining us to discuss this is Ahana Gautam (co-founder and CEO of food and beverage startup Open Secret), along with Avnish Bajaj (founder and managing director of Matrix Partners) and Rajinder Balaraman (director of Matrix Partners India).

Rajinder Balaraman (RB): Isn’t the first few years of every startup just do or die? Why does culture matter early in a startup’s journey?

Ahana Gautam (AG): Culture for me is very simple: It’s what people do when no one is watching.

And is culture important at an early stage? Absolutely. You can have the right product, you can have the brightest minds, but if you don’t have the right culture, you will not be able to unlock the full potential of a company.

There are two kinds of culture: One kind is when you put notes on your desk, and the other is when each and every person in the organization is living and breathing the culture.

A very simple example would be parenting. If you want to teach your kids values, how will you do that? If you want to teach kindness to your kid, for example, you can put posters about kindness in his or her room. But the biggest lesson for the kid is to see the parent and how that parent is reacting or behaving with other people around them. That’s how the kid is going to learn the most.

Avnish Bajaj (AB): I think the other question is, “Do you need culture to get to product-market fit?” And I think most people, including myself, undervalue culture at the early stage and think it gets in the way of hustle, that it gets in the way of getting things done.

I think if you can have a glue like culture to bind hustle together, you might be able to hustle more as an organization as opposed to as individuals.

RB: We’ve mentioned that culture links back to the product and to the people you look to bring on board as well. Can you speak a little bit more about what that means?

AG: I completely agree with Avnish that culture plays an integral role even at an early stage of a company. And the reason I say this is because culture should tie back to the mission statement of the company. So even when you go out talking to candidates for a role, you should be very clear about the culture that you want to build, as culture should not be copied.

Every founder is solving a unique problem in a unique way, so it has to be very, very authentic to who you are and what your DNA is. You can take inspiration from other companies, but again, going to the mission statement that you have, how do you build that culture which can enable you to attain that mission?