What 305 YC startups said they valued
A third of startups publish nothing
We started from the list of companies that have been through Y Combinator and appear on YC's "Top Private" and "Public" lists: 305 companies in all. Then we looked, one by one, for what each of them says it values.
The first finding is the gap. A company that has raised at a valuation above $150 million has, by any reasonable measure, hired enough people to need a shared answer to "how do we work here", and a third of them have not written one down anywhere a candidate could find it.
How many values should you have?
When you are writing or rewriting your own values, the first question is usually how many. The distribution answers it cleanly: almost everyone lands between three and six.
What the chart doesn't show is that many of the companies with seven or more are not really publishing values at all: they are publishing operating principles under a values heading. More on that in section 5.
What everyone says
The most published values, counted as a share of the 197 companies that publish any:
- Customer centric: 41%
- Ownership: 32%
- Bias for action: 25%
- Growth mindset: 19%
- Team cohesion: 15%
- Excellence: 15%
- Integrity: 13%
- Humility: 12%
- Empathy: 12%
- Innovation: 10%
- Trust: 9%
- Care: 9%
- Honesty: 9%
- Ambition: 8%
- Collaboration: 8%
Read the other way round, this is a list of how little separates one startup's values from another's. Fifteen names cover most of what 197 companies chose to say about themselves.
The same ideas under different names
Different companies reach for different words for the same idea, so we grouped the individual value names into 22 categories. Each company counts once per category.
- Customer centric: 41% (customer centric)
- Bias for action: 40% (bias for action, focus, impactful, iteration, urgency)
- Integrity & trust: 37% (disagree and commit, humility, integrity, low ego, trust)
- Growth mindset: 37% (continuous learning, curiosity, dive deep, growth mindset, problem first, truth-seeking)
- Ownership: 32% (ownership)
- Care & empathy: 31% (care, compassion, empathy, humanity, kindness, people first, work-life balance)
- Honesty: 22% (candor, honesty, respect, transparency)
- Excellence: 22% (above and beyond, excellence, quality, raise the bar)
- Team bonding: 22% (help others succeed, team cohesion, fun)
- Collaboration: 19% (collaboration, constructive feedback, team first, team player, teamwork)
- Diversity: 18% (authenticity, diversity, inclusivity, openness)
- Efficiency: 15% (efficiency, frugality, simplicity, consistency)
- Innovation: 15% (creativity, innovation, problem solver)
- Ambition: 14% (ambition, think big)
- Grit: 14% (grit, hungry, relentlessness, resilience, tenacity)
- Courage: 14% (boldness, confidence, courage, risk taking)
- Purpose: 12% (mission driven, passion, purpose)
- Speed: 7% (speed, velocity)
- Accountability: 6% (accountability, responsibility)
- Rigor: 6% (data-driven, discipline, rigor, thoughtfulness)
- Think long term: 6% (pragmatic, think long term)
- Performance: 5% (performance, results oriented)
Six categories stand clear of the rest, each used by more than 30% of companies. If you are writing your own set, those six are the ones you are implicitly choosing to include or to leave out.
Values, or principles
A growing number of companies label their list "principles". The argument is that values on their own are not actionable enough, and when a value is published as a single word with no explanation of what it looks like on a Tuesday afternoon, that argument is hard to disagree with.
Our own view is that the two do different jobs and you want both: values as the fundamental pillars of the culture, and principles inside each of them describing how the value shows up in daily work. A value nobody can act on is decoration.
Does the order matter?
If you can build an acronym out of your values, build it. It makes them far easier for everyone to remember. See CREDIT at GitLab, EPIC at Nomba, and CREAMY at Eclipse Foods.
If an acronym isn't available, order them from most to least important. In our previous company (PaletteHQ, YC S21) we put integrity first, because we handled critical customer data (CRM records and invoicing) and we wanted the ranking to be visible in hiring and in everyday decisions.
How this edition was made
- Sample
- 305 Y Combinator companies, taken from YC's own "Top Private" and "Public" lists. "Top Private" means a valuation above $150 million at the most recent funding round.
- Collection
- Values were looked up company by company on the web, from each company's own site where one was published.
- Coverage
- Found values for 197 companies, 65% of the sample. The remaining 35% published nothing we could find.
- Coding
- 22 categories, grouped top-down from the value names as they were collected. Each company counts once per category.
- Limits
- This edition counted value names, not their descriptions, and the 22 categories were assembled by hand as the corpus grew rather than induced from it. That makes the categories broader and fuzzier than the 2026 edition's, which is why the two editions should not be read as a trend. And a published value is a claim about culture, not evidence of one.
About this report
This edition was put together by two YC alumni, Fabien Pinel and JY Delmotte, who now run BuddiesHR, a suite of Slack apps for building culture at work.
Fabien Pinel
JY DelmotteSomething missing, or something you'd like counted in the next edition? Write to us at hello@buddieshr.com.
Values are easy to publish and hard to live
Nearly every company on this list wrote its values down. The harder part is making them visible in ordinary weeks, which is what BuddiesHR's Slack apps are for.
See how BuddiesHR helps →