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Nobody designs their culture. It just happens.
The first five people you hire bring their habits, their communication styles, their definitions of "good work." Then you survive a few crises together, and those survival patterns become gospel. Before long, you have a culture. You just didn't build it on purpose.
That's fine when you're small. The problem is what happens when you try to grow.
I joined a Series B company right after they closed a significant round. They were ready to scale. They went on an aggressive hiring spree, nearly doubling their headcount in about three months. They brought in experienced people from established companies, people who had built teams and shipped products and operated at scale.
I was one of those people. My job, in part, was to bridge the gap between how things had always been done and how they'd need to be done going forward.
It didn't work.
Within weeks, there was a clear divide. The people who'd been there from the early days started calling themselves "OGs." It was said with pride, like a badge of honor. But what it really did was draw a line. You were either in or you weren't.
The OGs had survived the scrappy years. They'd shipped in chaos, figured things out on the fly, built something from nothing. They were proud of that, and they should have been. But they'd also internalized a way of working that couldn't scale. No real processes. No documentation. Engineers treated like a free pool you could poach from whenever your feature felt urgent. Every successful launch felt a little like luck.
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When the new hires tried to bring structure, they got resistance. When they suggested processes, they got eye rolls. When they pushed back on how things were done, they got reminded—sometimes subtly, sometimes not—that they weren't OGs.
The inside jokes piled up. The power dynamics became clear. And slowly, the new people started to realize they weren't really meant to change anything. They were just meant to do more work the old way.
