How to build a culture in a Swiss Startup
Maybe you’ve just started a company with your best friends, your university classmates, or some cool people you met recently. You’ve got a great business case and things are taking off. Why should you be worried about culture? Doesn’t that just come naturally? It does, at first — but if you’re aiming for the stars, you better check your astronaut gear first.

Episodes on Startup Culture
Browse all episodesKey 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!
The best Swisspreneur podcast episodes on startup culture
During his chat with us, Sherpany’s Tobias Häckermann discusses why you shouldn’t outsource your culture to a Chief Culture Officer, and why employee Net Promoter Scores and employee referral hires are a great way of measuring the quality of your culture.
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Elisabete Ramalho distills her wealth of experience at Google into a few great culture tips, from why leaders should always be ready to acknowledge they’re wrong, to why you should focus on an employee’s strengths even while giving negative feedback, and why it’s so important to make people feel safe enough at work to speak up if they disagree with something.
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Drawing from a Samurai's meditative approach, Stride Venture Capital founder Fred Destin emphasizes the art of handling chaos and making high-speed decisions while staying grounded in your startup's mission. Navigating co-founder dynamics and instilling well-defined company values becomes paramount as Fred shares insights on building robust teams and fostering a culture of openness.
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