You're Already Building a Culture

Zappos: A Case Study

Most startup founders I work with don't think about company culture. They think that's something bigger companies worry about, something you deal with later, once you have HR and an office and enough people to fill an org chart.

Here's what they're missing: you're creating a culture from day one. Every decision about how you communicate, how you handle conflict, who you hire, what you tolerate, it's all building something. The only question is whether you're building it on purpose or by accident.

Tony Hsieh learned this the hard way. Before Zappos, he co-founded Link Exchange, an early internet advertising company. It grew fast. They hired fast to keep up with demand without thinking much about who they were bringing in or what kind of environment they were creating. By the time Microsoft acquired them, the culture had become so toxic that Hsieh walked away before he'd collected all the money he was owed. He couldn't stand being there anymore.

That experience shaped how he approached Zappos. This time, culture wasn't an afterthought. Hsieh built an environment obsessed with customer service and employee satisfaction, and he fiercely protected it. When Amazon came knocking to acquire them, he initially refused because Amazon tends to absorb companies into its own culture. He'd already lived through watching a company become somewhere he didn't want to work. He wasn't doing it again.

Amazon's response was to launch a competing site called Endless. They had more money, more engineers, more everything. It didn't matter. Endless couldn't compete with Zappos and bled money until Amazon gave up and agreed to let Zappos operate as an independent subsidiary with its own culture intact.

That's how valuable intentional culture can be; it beat Amazon's resources.

But here's the thing: Hsieh only got there because Link Exchange taught him what happens when you don't pay attention. Most founders don't get that lesson until the damage is done. They wake up one day to find themselves running a company full of people they don't want to work with, wondering how it got this way.

It got that way because nobody decided how it should be instead.

You don't need a manifesto or a retreat or a Chief Culture Officer. You need to ask yourself: what do I want it to feel like to work here? And then make decisions that point in that direction, starting now, not when you're "big enough" for it to matter.