When the team is small, it is possible to bring a cake for every birthday. You can even take half a day off to celebrate each other's. But once the team is big enough, you can't take every birthday off, you can't keep bringing cake every single day.

Every company that grows goes through transitions like that one. In the beginning, you can list the entire team on your website, but at some point, you only want to show the leadership team. And the people will notice when you take them out of the website, and they will hurt for a while until they figure it was never that important.

Defining what the culture of your work environment is, is the task of the founders and the leadership team.

Culture must be nurtured from the beginning because it's a defining characteristic of the work environment. It's one of the few things that will be resilient to business changes.

I have seen brutal companies. People blame each other for mistakes, they call them out and publicly shame them. If you have a negative reaction to that statement, that means the culture of the place is not for you. On the other hand, it may resonate very well with your personality and that's the company where you'll flourish.

Although that's an extreme case, working in a culture with people not afraid to call out mistakes can be the difference between having safe planes or ending up like Boeing. Cultures are established over a long time and by continuous practice. It is not just deciding to be remote, or following a scrum methodology. It's about everything that goes around the immediate tasks.

I worked in a very large metallurgical company. The CEO was several layers of management above me, but he took care of rotating through the entire organization more than once a year to make sure anybody could reach him if they had something to say. It was not an all-hands type of presentation, but just a visit.

Startup CEOs get bewildered by the opportunities that are presented to them: speaking engagements, panels, podcasts.

Sometimes they are so busy on themselves that they forget about the business they are building. It's not strange in a 30-person company that an employee has not seen the CEO in the last 6 months.

It's not a judgment of character, but just an example of how different these two work cultures can be. Sometimes founders do not pay special attention and they just go with the flow. It's not rare to find these same entrepreneurs alienated from what they have been building. The effort to change a broken culture is massive and lengthy. It will take a toll on people and businesses.

The earlier you start focusing on the other dimensions of building a business, the smoother it'll be when you have to transition through some hardships, such as layoffs, pivots, or competition.