A Brief Field Guide to Startup Culture (Observed in the Wild)
Vol. 2: The Culture Specimen
TLDR: Startup culture is real. It's also doing a lot of heavy lifting for org charts that don't exist, decisions that never get made, and onboarding docs nobody opens. This one's a field guide.
In the early-stage startup ecosystem, one phrase surfaces with remarkable consistency across founder conversations, investor decks, and offsite agendas.
“Our culture is our competitive advantage.”
Fascinating... Let’s take a closer look
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The Culture Specimen (Culturum indefinitum)
The Culture Specimen is identified most reliably not by what it does, but by what it replaces.
It replaces the org chart nobody has drawn. The decision-making framework nobody has written down. The onboarding doc that technically exists in a Notion page created in 2022 that three of the current twelve employees have opened.
The Culture Specimen thrives in environments where the founder is a genuinely good human who cares deeply about their team, and also has no idea who owns the Sales-to-CS handoff. These two things are not in conflict. They coexist beautifully in companies between $800K and $5M ARR.
You will know you are in the presence of a Culture Specimen when you ask “who decides X” and someone says “oh we’re pretty flat here, we just talk it out.”
They are not wrong. They DO just talk it out. For about 45 minutes per decision. In a meeting that was supposed to be 20 minutes. That the founder had to be in.
The Culture Specimen is warm. It is well-intentioned. It went to great effort to pick a values statement that sounds like it came from a real human being.
It has not been able to explain those values to a new hire in a way that tells them what to actually DO.
Observed Behavior in the Wild
The Culture Specimen is most active during:
Offsite season (spring and fall). You will recognize the offsite by the presence of a whiteboard covered in sticky notes organized into a framework that will not be referenced again until the next offsite.
All-hands meetings. The Culture Specimen performs beautifully here. Slides are crisp. The founder is inspiring. Someone asks a question that reveals a fundamental misalignment between two departments and the founder says “great point, let’s take that offline” and weirdly, it is never taken offline.
Hiring conversations. “Culture fit” is invoked reliably at this stage. It is doing a LOT of work in the interview process. Structural clarity is not invited to the interview. Process ownership does not get a recruiter screen.
What the Culture Specimen Is Not
The Culture Specimen is not VALUES. Values are real, and they matter, and they show up in how you treat a customer when something goes wrong, how you give feedback to someone who is struggling, what you decide NOT to do when the money is on the table.
The Culture Specimen is not COMMUNITY. The fact that your team likes each other is genuinely beautiful. I mean that, but it does not tell anyone what to do when a deal closes, and nobody knows whose job it is to kick off onboarding.
The Culture Specimen is also not ACCOUNTABILITY. Accountability is structural and involves somebody’s name next to a thing with a date. The Culture Specimen prefers collective ownership, which is another way of saying no single owner, which is another way of saying nobody owns it.
Prognosis
The Culture Specimen does not die easily. It is remarkably adaptive. It will survive two funding rounds, four new hires, and at least one painful departure that everyone describes as “not a culture fit” that was actually a structure fit.
What eventually happens: the company gets to a size where the founder cannot physically be in every room, and suddenly the culture has to DO something without them in it. And that is when everyone discovers the culture was always the founder. Which is beautiful, AND not scalable.
The fix is not complicated. It is just not glamorous enough to put on a slide.
It is: who owns what, who decides what, what happens when, and what does good look like. Written down. Given to a person. With a name on it.
That is not a threat to your culture. That IS your culture. You just haven’t built it yet.
Until next time. The wildlife persists.
KB
If any of this felt uncomfortably familiar… I work with a small number of founders in an advisory capacity. Monthly calls, async access, a second brain on the stuff that’s actually breaking. No full embed required.
If you’re not ready for that either, just hit reply. I read everything. Let’s get