How to build a culture in a Swiss Startup

Key takeaways on how to build a Startup Culture

• You have a culture, whether you know it or not: culture-building happens implicitly in the early days, as a natural result of your relationship with your co-founders and early employees.
• Implicit culture doesn’t scale: as your company grows, if you don’t make a conscious effort to explicitly define your culture, you’ll end up allowing the wrong people to be hired, and the vibe and ethics of your company will go down the toilet.
• How do we define company values? 
  Step 1: Send out a values survey asking your co-founders and employees about their top 5 values. 
  Step 2: Merge differently worded but conceptually similar values. 
  Step 3: Define the top 5 most commonly chosen values and discuss them with the team, collectively defining each value in one sentence.
• Together with your team, define your mission (“Why do we exist as a company? What value do we provide?”), your vision (“What’s the most ambitiously successful future we can conceive of?”) and your strategy (“How are we going to get there?”).
• Repeat, repeat, repeat: you cannot emphasize your values enough. Repeat them to your team until everyone is sick of hearing about them. Your co-founders should be able to recite them in their sleep.
• Hold wrongdoers accountable: if someone on the team doesn’t live up to one of your values, let them know about it. If they do it again, devise an improvement plan with them. Make it clear that if they fail a third time, they’re out.
• Walk the talk: no one likes a hypocrite. You as the founder are under an obligation to follow the values you try to instill on your team. There’s nothing like leading by example!