What fast-growing startups say they value

Your values will change as you grow

Split the sample by headcount and the value sets move in a consistent direction. What rises is operational: customer obsession, one team, grit, resourcefulness. What fades is founding-story material: mission and purpose, innovation and contrarianism, iterate and experiment, agency and autonomy.

The obvious reading is that companies mature into caring about customers. The more interesting one is what happens to purpose. It doesn't get added as a company grows up; it gets displaced. At 50 people, purpose is what you have instead of a customer base. By 250, the customers are real and the list gets rewritten around them.

What everyone says

Below the top three the list drops away quickly: one team at 28%, craft and excellence at 25%, curiosity and learning at 24%. Twenty-eight categories were needed to code the corpus, but a handful carry nearly all the weight.

Set that against the median value set of five, and the arithmetic is unkind. A startup writing five values, picking each one independently from what its peers publish, will land on a list that overlaps substantially with the company next door. The distinctiveness a values exercise is supposed to produce is being competed away by everyone doing the exercise the same way.

What nobody says

We searched every value name and every description for a set of themes that appear constantly in writing about workplace culture. Most of them are simply not there. Not rare: absent. Two of them do not occur once across 200 companies and 1,001 values.

Profit, revenue and margin appear at 7 companies out of 200, which is its own small story about what venture-funded startups consider worth declaring. Diversity, at 17, is the most common item on this list and still sits far below craft or curiosity.

The charitable reading is that these are hygiene factors rather than values: you don't put "we pay people" on the wall. The less charitable one is that published values describe what a company wants from its employees, and this list is what employees want from the company. The absences are the finding.

Most values can't be lived

We coded each value for whether it describes something you could catch a specific person doing on a specific day. "Move fast" is behavioural. "Excellence" is not. Just under a third clear the bar, and 38% of companies publish a full set without a single one.

The grammar predicts it. 40% of values are bare nouns and 36% are imperatives, and the split runs straight down the middle of the behavioural coding: iterate and experiment is 58% behavioural, speed and action 57%, focus and simplicity 56%, while mission and purpose manages 10%. Values built from verbs are recognisable. Values built from nouns aren't.

This is the difference between a value and a mood. A company whose list is "integrity, excellence, passion" has published three adjectives about the kind of people it hopes to have hired. There is no version of a Tuesday in which someone visibly does excellence, which means there is no version of a Tuesday in which anyone can be recognised for it, and a value nobody is ever recognised for is one nobody has any reason to act on.

Whose values are you running?

Ownership, customer obsession, bias for action, raise the bar, disagree and commit and dive deep are all Amazon Leadership Principles. Extreme ownership comes from Jocko Willink's book of that name. First principles is the Musk-popularised strand of a much older idea. Nearly a quarter of the sample uses at least one of them as a value name.

This isn't copying, and reading it that way misses what is actually happening. It's a shared vocabulary: a set of phrases that became the default way to express an idea, in the same way that "OKR" became the default way to talk about goals. Using them is efficient: everyone knows roughly what "bias for action" means before you explain it.

The cost is that the phrase arrives with someone else's definition attached, formed at a company with a different size, market and set of problems. If you publish "customer obsession" without saying what it means at your company, the definition your team will use is Amazon's.

Culture isn't universal

The startup value set reads as a global standard, and mostly it is: customer obsession sits between 38% and 53% in every region we could measure. But the edges differ. Speed and action is markedly a US preoccupation. Integrity and trust is named nearly twice as often outside the US as inside it. Curiosity and learning spikes in Latin America.

What the newest startups dropped

Grouping companies by the YC batch they went through shows the newest cohort publishing a narrower set than the oldest. One team has more than halved. Transparency has almost vanished. Fun and optimism, innovation and contrarianism, grit, and curiosity all fall in the same direction.

Almost nothing rises to replace them. Craft and excellence is the only category that clearly gains, from 23% to 32%. The top three (customer obsession, ownership, speed) barely move at all. The collective vocabulary is thinning: the newest companies are converging on the same short operational list and dropping everything around it.

A caution on causation: these are cohorts, not the same companies observed over time, and the 2022+ group is younger and smaller as well as newer. Some of this is age, not vintage.

Position one is the honest one

Order is data. It survives in the collection because we recorded each value's published position, and it turns out to carry information the prevalence chart doesn't. Customer obsession isn't just the most common value; it is by far the most likely to be put first, with a mean position of 2.5 in sets that average five.

Read the bottom of the table instead and you get the more useful signal. Craft and excellence appears at a quarter of companies and almost never leads. One team appears at 28% and leads 17% of the time. These are the values that got included because leaving them out would have looked odd. What a company puts first is what it will actually trade the others against. If you want to know what an organisation really optimises for, read position one and stop.

Five is the number

This is the most directly usable number in the study. If you are writing a set of values and wondering how many to have, the answer the market has converged on is five, with three and six both entirely normal and four very common.

Above eight you are an outlier: four companies publish eight, and six publish more. In practice, most long lists aren't values at all: they are operating principles collected under a values heading, which is a reasonable thing to publish but a different thing.

Values, principles or tenets

We recorded the verbatim heading above each list. "Values" wins comfortably at 61%, but a third of companies reach for something else: culture, beliefs, "what we stand for", "how we operate", or a bespoke line of their own.

The rename usually signals an attempt to fix exactly the problem in section 4. "How we work" is a promise that what follows will be behavioural. It's a good instinct, though changing the heading is easier than changing the list underneath it, and both have to happen for the rename to mean anything.

Every value we found

All 1,001 values, in the companies' own words. Search the names and descriptions, filter by category, size or region, or click a company to see its full set in the order it publishes them. Descriptions are verbatim, including the punctuation, emoji and non-English text that came with them.

Sixty-eight of these rows are marked with a dashed chip: they sit in the three categories (product doctrine, hiring criteria and uncodeable) that are recorded to keep the taxonomy honest and are excluded from every statistic above.

About this report

The Startup Culture Insights Report is an annual study by BuddiesHR. It is put together by two YC alumni, Fabien Pinel and JY Delmotte.

Fabien Pinel JY Delmotte

Found a company we missed, or a number you want to argue with? Write to hello@buddieshr.com. Earlier editions are listed on the report hub.