Culture

“I think it's gonna be cool to be fiscally responsible. It seems like that's the way that the culture has shifted, and that's now the brag, and before, that's the flex.”

“When I hear people giving talks about culture, especially when they're currently a CEO, my fake CEO meter goes up, my alarm bells go off, because I'm like, okay, if you're out lecturing about culture to people, I kind of doubt that you're actually doing things…”

“The best cultures are really almost cult-like. You know your culture is highly differentiated. It should actually kind of be hard for someone to inorganically insert into your culture, otherwise it's not a very differentiated culture whatsoever.”

“I think it's an interesting world where if execution is commoditized to compute, then it goes back to, okay, like literally the most creative person, but also the person who can control culture and dictate taste is the one who wins.”

“80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder.”

“What lowbrow people do is they start talking like the machines. Like, they start trying, like, so there's a whole genre of people who are speaking like LLMs. They're imitating the fucking technology, and like, that is what lowbrow people do. What highbrow peop…”

“That's why I think it's really comes from the Founders personalities. It's very hard to live something you're not... If you are who you are. And like, that is the culture of the company. Even if you write down a different culture from who you are, So unless yo…”

“If we were at 20 people and then we tried to write the culture, then like, it's hard to have a cohesive culture when you haven't tried to build a cohesive culture.”

“So, like, culture, and just to define it you know, first of all, it's not a set of beliefs. It's a set of actions, and those actions kind of determine how we show up to work, how we treat each other, what we're like to do business with, what we're like to inve…”

“And then we're going to get a big flip into realness, into authenticity. And here's the other one. Into forgiveness.”

“I do agree that the best CEOs are exceptionally good capital allocators, but I don't think it's the most important part of a CEO's job. I think it is an important job, but by far not the most important. I think more important is to drive the culture. You drive…”

“Meaningful culture is culture that helps people make micro decisions without policies. Like they understand general principles as a result of that, they know How to make decisions that come up in the day to day without having to be like, Hey, should I go this …”

“Economic power and military power is downstream of technology. In fact, even culture is downstream of technology.”

“That's a way in which you can weave brands into culture. In a way that doesn't necessarily need to be ridiculous production value, a TV advert.”

“Two placeholders is brand and culture. You may describe everything by brand, and you may describe everything by culture, but usually it doesn't have any sense, and you need to ask, Clarifying questions, because you always may say, our situation is bad because …”

“If you're going to prioritize, like, an interview versus a deal versus, let's say, you know, like an internal meeting, you really want to make sure there's one thing you prioritize, it's like the interview, because especially early on when you're founding the …”

“If that's true, then it's measurable and it can be a leading indicator. And it absolutely is. Like if you really pay attention to the culture on a team by team basis, it's an amazing, very effective way to drive results, but also a very effective way to know w…”

“I think a lot of people think about culture as touchy-feely, right? Are employees happy? And for us, that's not the question. It's more about alignment. Are employees behaving in a way that will help that company grow its moat?”

“Driving culture is really important because if you don't, you know, other people will fill that void. Right. And you get subcultures in a city or a division, Because strong personalities can do that. So unless you are filling that void, right? It will get fill…”

“If you don't pay attention to culture, culture will run away from you.”

“I just feel like culture is driven by language. I don't know any culture in the world that is not glued together by language, whether it's your family, your religion, there's language, and I think that the CEO of a company is the shaman of that culture, and th…”

“Shipping isn't the thing you celebrate. You celebrate succeeding, you don't celebrate shipping, and if you build a culture that only celebrates shipping, you don't build a culture that celebrates winning”

“Well, I think what it means is culture suffers. Culture suffers, number one, and then loneliness increases, number two.”

“I just think job titles in general probably gonna be Not as prominent in our culture in 10, 20, 30 years time, especially for the terminally online, like ourselves.”

“And so just gives rise to like endless conflict because people need to share culture before they can agree on law.”

“Ultimately everything that we see in the business world is downstream of culture.”

“When we're building companies, we actually build two products. We build one for our customers and we build another one for our employees. And that's actually that how we work part of it. That's the term he uses for that is culture. That's the product we build …”

“When you move to a new country, you lose a lot of stuff, so you might change your name, and you might change the way you dress, and you might change the way you talk, because you have to learn a new language, but I think food is that one thing that sticks with…”

“When you're scaling, if you don't have the horizontal culture, your culture will not scale, and then that will become a competitive disadvantage because it's very hard and takes a lot of energy to refactor culture, and that's part of the reason why everyone te…”

“At some level, like in biology, we're wired with a hierarchical instinct, right? We see it in animals, we see it in tribes, we see it in how we organize organizations, and then how we curb or direct that instinct becomes sort of like culture or philosophy or r…”

“I think it's a false dichotomy though to say that if you take VC money, you're going to have a terrible culture.”

“Deliberately choosing and building a team at the very outset will carry through the organization from the get-go. I mean, you can, you know, a lot of companies try to graft on these Diversity initiatives, 12 years after the founding of the company, and those t…”

“I think like we live in a culture now where everybody feels it is so zero sum when it's not in fact zero sum. And people just begrudge other people's success, especially by the way when it's earned.”

“And it feels like the internet's impact on culture is, is just beginning in, in the sense of, like, a world in which culture is based on the internet, which is what I think is happening is just at the very start, right, because it had to get universal before i…”

“The definition that I utilize is the difference between showing up for work and volunteering your best.”

“You can make something a moral issue, but it's not gonna really stick or work unless it's at least related to one of the moral foundations.”

“Things that may or may not be true end up becoming part of the culture, and it's very hard to get rid of it once they're there.”

“You can imagine, you're actually playing a whole series of local interaction models. And that collection of local interaction solutions you can think of as comprising a part of culture.”

“And in fact, we measure it in our work, and we can show that culture has a predictive effect on organizational outcomes and on technology capabilities.”

“And I think what we've learned at LinkedIn is that compensation is not how culture is formed, ok?”

“If you have a culture where people don't feel confident and feel free to tell the truth and to voice their opinions, when a crisis or problem happens that is going to make it much worse.”

“Why would a culture connect dignity with the idea of work? And it's, I just think it's been a useful thing to do. If you live in a very uncertain world, Where there's things like, you know, a horde of locusts can take out the crops for the year, and then there…”

“Culture matters, but it matters in silos. What happened is that deep down inside, just because you grew up in Kenya or in another corrupt country, it doesn't mean that you become corrupt as an individual. It just means that culture come and says there are some…”

“I think culture is the way that we work when no one tells us how to work. It's the artifact and kind of the learned muscle memory of the past process and accountability decisions the company made.”

“Culture in a company is, is basically, it's like, how do people behave When you're not, like, looking. Like, what do they do left to their own devices?”

“And it turns out that the best way to understand culture is through a significant revolution.”

“You know, as the founding CEO of Hulu you know, it was very, you know, clear to me that the culture of Hulu really was going to be how I acted a lot when no one was looking because people model that over time and then it perpetuates.”

“As a company begins to scale, you have to transform, you know, what each founder believes, what each founder stands for into an actual culture that then permeates the business.”

“And I think this emergence of computers as a source of knowledge is going to be every bit as momentous as the previous three were.”

“Conversely, a lot of the knowledge that we have from evolution and from experience and from culture, we often tend to think of it as much more certain than it really is. We have this great tendency that's been well studied by psychologists to be overconfident …”

“Countries are only really great if they have great culture. It's not like it's then you have a great country, and then you add culture. When we look back at history, we don't, you know, count how much money different civilizations have, because it's all relati…”