Why Startup Culture is So Hard — and What to Do About It

Three Coaches: Sonya Hausafus, Alexis Halkovic, and Tolonda Tolbert at Colorado Startup Week

At Colorado Startup Week, Tim and I joined two of our CultureCamp AI Coach Advisory Panel members—Tolonda Tolbert, PhD, and Sonya Hausafus, PCC—for a lively session called Beyond the Breakpoint: Culture at Scale.

The room was buzzing with real, pressing questions from founders and team leaders. Almost all of them came back to the same challenge: how do you keep culture intact when your company is doubling or tripling in size, seemingly overnight?

Why culture slips so easily in startups

Each stage of funding—pre-seed, seed, Series A, and beyond—usually brings one big mandate: hire. And not just a handful of people—sometimes hundreds, all at once. Suddenly, the founding team is outnumbered. New employees arrive with their own values, workstyles, and expectations. If you don’t have intentional guardrails in place, culture can drift fast.

Most startup founders don’t set out to ignore culture. They’re focused on the essentials: build the product, move fast, land funding, grow .But that pace often leaves little room for naming values, crafting a vision, or building practices that sustain a healthy culture. Leaders in the US often expect themselves to know everything, but it is essential to understand your strengths as well as the areas where you are not the expert. Working with a coach who is an expert on organizational culture can provide invaluable support through these cycles of growth. The cost of overlooking this work becomes clear later, when:

• A new senior leader has the right résumé but clashes with the culture, destabilizing the whole organization.

• A wave of new hires dilutes the founding ethos, leaving values fuzzy and motivation flat.

• Technical experts are promoted into leadership roles without the lever of culture alignment and missing the skills to lead well, creating team rifts.

• External pressures—like market uncertainty and political polarization—add stress, undermining psychological safety and engagement.

What you can do about it

The good news: culture doesn’t have to slip away. In our session, our experienced coaches discussed practical ways they keep it front and center:

• Name your culture early. Work with a coach to help you define values, vision, and mission—and revisit them as you grow.

• Create shared spaces. Invite employees into conversations about culture, not just leadership.

• Bake culture into people processes. Job descriptions, interviews, performance reviews, and pulse checks all send signals about what matters.

• Make values actionable. Map them to specific work behaviors so they aren’t just words on the wall.

• Shine a light on the invisible. Use assessments (like CultureCamp AI) to surface hidden dynamics within and across teams.

• Invest in coaching. Coaches help leaders understand their impact, shift patterns before they calcify, and model healthier dynamics. They also bring to light issues that are part of culture vs interpersonal conflicts or other types of problems.

Why this matters

Culture lives both in the visible (statements, rituals, policies) and the invisible (assumptions, tensions, unspoken norms). Aspirations are easy to print on a poster; behaviors are harder to interpret and to shift. Skilled coaches working with teams to interpret assessments make the invisible visible—helping leaders catch conflicts, burnout risks, and disengagement early, while also amplifying what’s working. 

Culture isn’t about being nice—it drives whether your Series A hires stay past 12 months, or whether cross-functional teams can actually deliver - in short - the long-term health of your organization. 

At CultureCamp AI, we’re building alongside founders, leaders, and coaches — guided by our Coach Advisory Council to stay grounded in real-world challenges. Our tools bring transparency to team dynamics, helping coaches identify alignment and conflict so they can accelerate impact. In a time when tech often replaces people, we’re taking the opposite approach: putting the right technology in the hands of coaches, so they can guide the intentional growth and sustainability of organizational culture.

The future of your company won’t be defined by code or capital alone, but by the culture you intentionally build to last. 

Want to explore further?

• For teams: Try the CultureCamp AI assessment to gain clarity on what’s driving (or derailing) your culture.

• For coaches: See how CultureCamp AI offers a private lens into client teams and a platform to sustain your impact. Reach out at coach@alexishalkovic.com