What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

by Ben Horowitz

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.

Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are.

What you measure is what you value. Huawei’s results echoed Uber’s. Once you remove the requirement to follow certain rules or obey certain laws, you basically remove ethics from the culture.

The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.

When we started Andreessen Horowitz in 2009, the one virtue I knew I wanted in our culture was respect for the entrepreneur. Venture capitalists (VCs) depend on entrepreneurs for their existence, and I wanted our culture to reflect that. The systemic problem was that as entrepreneurs asked venture capitalists for funding, VCs tended to see themselves as in the commanding role. Many carried themselves accordingly. I took a samurai-style approach. First, we defined the virtue thoroughly, taking pains to note what it did not mean: We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process and we know that without the entrepreneurs we have no business. When dealing with entrepreneurs, we always show up on time and we always get back to them timely and with substantive feedback, even if it’s bad news (like a rejection). We have an optimistic view of the future and believe that entrepreneurs, whether they succeed or fail, are working to help us achieve a better future. As a result, we never publicly criticize any entrepreneur or startup (doing so is a fireable offense). This does not mean that we leave CEOs in place forever. Our obligation is to the company not the founder. If the founder is no longer capable of running the company, the founder will not remain as CEO.

Imagine being in a heated debate and hearing someone say, “Let’s disagree and commit.” You’d respond, “Commit to what? My idea or yours?” So what did Barksdale do? He created a piece of lore so memorable it outlived the company itself. At a company all-hands he said: We have three rules here at Netscape. The first rule is if you see a snake, don’t call committees, don’t call your buddies, don’t form a team, don’t get a meeting together, just kill the snake. The second rule is don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made. And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes.

Collaborative people know that their success is limited by uncollaborative people, so they are either going to help those people raise their game or they are going to get rid of them.

Good intentions, pursued without meticulous forethought and follow-through, often lead to catastrophe.

It all started with the hiring profile. People understand their own strengths, value them highly, and know how to test for them in an interview. Our firm had this issue in every department. Our head of marketing was a woman and she had a lot of women working for her. I asked her what was in her profile that made it difficult for men to get a job in marketing. “Helpfulness,” she replied. I was floored. Of course! We were a services firm. Every job description in our company should have helpfulness in the profile, but I was the founder and I had never even considered it. I was blind. I could not see the exact contours of the talent we needed to find, so we were missing out.

I knew we had to change our selection process if we wanted to compete at the highest level. Like many companies, our recruiting networks emanated from our employees. So we had to broaden our talent network.

For example, one criterion men often overlook when hiring a manager—but women rarely do—is the ability to give feedback. Women are more willing to confront a coworker and have a difficult conversation; men often avoid the issue until it gets superhot. We also made sure that our interview teams came from a range of backgrounds, so that we were better able to see the complete candidate.

More important, we haven’t just improved our numbers. We’ve improved our cultural cohesion. Because we test for helpfulness, we value it and we value the people who have it. We can see them for who they are, not what they look like.

It’s easy to value the things that you test for in an interview and nearly impossible to value things that you don’t.

The first step in getting the culture you want is knowing what you want. It sounds obvious and it is; it sounds easy, but it’s not. With seemingly infinite possibilities to choose from, how do you design a culture that gives your organization the advantages it needs, creates an environment you are proud of, and that—most importantly—can actually be implemented? A few points to keep in mind: Whether your company is a startup or a hundred years old, designing your culture is always relevant. Cultures, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges. All cultures are aspirational. I have worked with thousands of companies and none of them ever achieved total cultural compliance or harmony. In a company of any significant size there will always be violations. The point is not to be perfect, just better than you were yesterday. While you can draw inspiration from other cultures, don’t try to adapt another organization’s ways. For your culture to be vibrant and sustainable, it must come from the blood, from the soul.

Making your hiring profile a big part of how you define your culture makes enormous sense—because who you hire determines your culture more than anything else. Patrick Collison, cofounder and CEO of Stripe, told me: Honestly, most of what ultimately defined us happened in the hiring of the first twenty people. So the question of what do you want the culture to be and who do you want to hire are in some sense the same question.

Stewart Butterfield, the cofounder and CEO of Slack, said that orienting his culture around the kind of employees he wanted has started to dramatically improve things at the company: Our values were really original—they included playfulness and solidarity, for instance—but they weren’t an effective guide to action. We were trying to find something that would help people make a decision. Then I remembered a conversation I had with Suresh Khanna, who led sales at AdRoll. One thing he said really stuck with me. He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.

Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?”

Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack.

Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. T...

Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is ea...

Many potential cultural elements are too abstract to be effective. If you define “integrity” as a virtue, will that clarify exactly how people should behave? If there’s a conflict, does integrity mean meeting your product schedule as promised or delivering the quality that your customers expect?

Is your virtue actionable? According to bushido, a culture is not a set of beliefs, but a set of actions. What actions do your cultural virtues translate to? Can you turn empathy, for instance, into an action? If so, it may work as a virtue. If not, best to design your culture with a different virtue. Does your virtue distinguish your culture? Not every virtue will be unique to your company, but if every other business in your field does the same thing, there is probably no need to emphasize it. If you’re a Silicon Valley company, there is no need to make casual dress a virtue, because that’s the default behavior. But if you’re a technology company and you want everyone to wear a suit and tie, that will define your culture.