📖 This article is the final edition in a wider six-part series on “How to build a winning startup culture” – you can check-out earlier instalments here.
Perhaps the hardest part of culture-building is keeping it intact through rapid growth. What starts as a tight-knit five-person ethos can morph into something unrecognisable by 500 people if you’re not careful.
Founders we spoke to all acknowledged this challenge. Mostafa Amin:
“Believe me, doubling [the team] from 5 to 10, getting 10 to 100 will become harder… everything is correlated at the end of the day to your persistence in making sure everyone is aligned.”
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As Breadfast scaled into the thousands of employees, maintaining the original “founder mode” culture became, in Mostafa’s words:
“a big nightmare on us… the company is growing massively… it’s not an easy job”.
There’s no sugar-coating it: you will see some cultural drift. Habits slip, early camaraderie fades, newcomers don’t have the same context, communication gets harder.
So what can founders do?
First, accept that culture will evolve – and be ready to actively shape its evolution. Some aspects of your culture should change as you grow.
For instance, a 10-person company might thrive on ad-hoc processes and close supervision by founders, but a 100-person company likely needs more structured workflows and delegated decision-making to avoid chaos.
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