Founders often assume they share values without saying it out loud, but that silence causes conflict and startup failure. The fix: write down your personal values and translate them into company values before you hire anyone. Even a two-person team needs this.
At the beginning of the company, when you're a, you know, a garage startup, or there's just a few of you, the, the shared values component seems particularly easy because there are 3 of you or 4 of you, and you all come in with a shared set of values. Unfortunately, this is usually implicit, and when you get founder issues, which is a source of friction among many early teams and is one of the 2 great killers of startups, the other being shiny object syndrome, which we'll talk about later. It's because they didn't sit down and actually make their values explicit. They didn't write down what they care about and why and how they're going to organize their company and how they're going to organize themselves and how they're going to make decisions when there is a clear trade-off and no right decision, which is most of the time. So what I try to encourage people to do is even when it's just 3 of you, or two of you, sit down and write out the values that matter to you. Why are you doing this? What do you care about in life, not just your company? And then create a set of values for the company that are going to be the foundation for the culture.
