Written by Victoria Stoyanova – host of Creative Mornings, adviser for Second Home, and facilitator for TechStars. Victoria works as a Community Architect, spending her days transforming traditional corporate environments into genuinely happy, creative workspaces.
Evasive, immeasurable and hard to explain, culture is to companies what chemistry is to couples – it's either there or it's not.
For many of us, "work" has changed. It's no longer about a paycheck at the end of the month. It's about building something meaningful with people who get it. Culture is the invisible glue that holds everything together.
Today's twenty and thirty-somethings came of age through the 2008 financial crisis – directly hit by recession, watching trusted governments and institutions fail in real time. So they did what each young generation does best: reinvented themselves.
In a world where stable corporations can collapse overnight and degrees don't guarantee jobs, a generation chose to embrace risk and uncertainty instead. New values. A new idea of freedom – one guided by meaning rather than security. An individual declaration of independence that resonated with millions.
Enter the entrepreneur. The defining job title of a generation. What advertising was to the 60s, what banking was to the 2000s.
Community, culture, care
Entrepreneurship brought its own culture with it. Long hours, flat structures, transparency, flexibility. But perhaps the most important thing it introduced to mainstream working life was the idea of community – being part of a group with shared values and goals.
Research from the Millennial Branding report – a snapshot of that era's workplace attitudes – found that 71% of young workers wanted their colleagues to feel like a second family. Built on trust, empathy and shared experience, just like the real thing.
In practice, empathy at work means understanding what people actually need day-to-day and adapting to it. Sometimes picking up a relative from the airport matters more than a weekly team meeting. Working from home after a big project isn't slacking – it's recovery.
Flexibility only works when it's paired with trust. Employers need confidence the work gets done. Employees need to know that confidence exists. Without both sides of that, it unravels quickly.
So culture is everything. But if it can make or break a company, how do you actually build one worth belonging to?
It's simpler than you think
As with anything unfamiliar, it's easy to overthink culture. There's the same brain paralysis as the first time someone tells you to write a business plan. Or file your taxes. You collect information, analyse, summarise, and end up more confused than when you started.
Here's the thing: you don't need a framework. You can intuitively identify what matters in your company – because you're already living it.
There's no recipe for the "right" culture, just like there's no recipe for the right job or the right relationship. That complexity is exactly where the beauty of it lies. Brian Chesky, one of Airbnb's co-founders, defines culture simply as "a shared way of doing something with passion." A set of values, and the way they're expressed. That's it.
Values are actions, not aspirations
Most companies will tell you their values are "openness", "inclusivity" and "transparency". There's a paragraph about it on the About page that sounds like it was generated by randomly combining positive words. (The list always contains "fun".) But values aren't meant to sit quietly on a website. They're something to act on every day.
Real values show up in every customer email, every team interaction, every decision made under pressure. Identifying them clearly – and holding each other accountable for living by them – is one of the most important things a founder can do.
Basecamp and Buffer built their identities around remote work before it was mainstream. Patagonia became as known for its workplace as its products – a culture that actively supports a healthy, balanced life. These aren't abstract values like "openness." They're bold, specific choices. Things you can point to.
Whether it's giving back to the community, building rituals worth looking forward to, or simply protecting people's time – finding what genuinely matters to your team and celebrating it is how culture gets made.
Leadership is changing too. Where management once meant structuring and administering, companies like Red Hat and Zappos have dismantled traditional hierarchies in favour of something more autonomy-driven. Mission-led, rather than just process-led.
The shift is real. Work is increasingly about doing something meaningful with people who share your values. Get the culture right, and everything else follows with intention.