Great post. I've always thought a good metric on how much founders really care about culture is to see how many early employees still work at mature companies. Retaining somebody for 1 year is easy, but retaining somebody for 5 years is really really hard.
I found that an unnamed founder (to protect his ego) had a great statement on this topic:
> And the other thing worth mentioning is, on the first ten people on the culture and team topic, I think everyone doesn't realize until they go through it themselves, how important it is because in life and media people focus too much on founders. Here we are and we are reinforcing the structural narrative that Stripe is about John and Patrick and Pinterest is about Ben. When the vast majority of what our companies do, 99.9% are done by people that are not us, right? It's obvious when you say it but it's very much not the macro narrative. These are abstracts and you associate them with certain people. For companies like Apple and others, Steve Jobs was a tiny, tiny part at the end.
I found that an unnamed founder (to protect his ego) had a great statement on this topic:
> And the other thing worth mentioning is, on the first ten people on the culture and team topic, I think everyone doesn't realize until they go through it themselves, how important it is because in life and media people focus too much on founders. Here we are and we are reinforcing the structural narrative that Stripe is about John and Patrick and Pinterest is about Ben. When the vast majority of what our companies do, 99.9% are done by people that are not us, right? It's obvious when you say it but it's very much not the macro narrative. These are abstracts and you associate them with certain people. For companies like Apple and others, Steve Jobs was a tiny, tiny part at the end.
> Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Dl8rZ6qwE&feature=youtu.be...
If I were looking to join a company, these are the kind of statements that would make me want to work for that founder.