Building a Startup Culture: 5 Core Values to Win
Number 5 is also called "Don't Be Stupid"
TLDR: Startups that play it safe don’t change industries—strong values are the foundation of bold innovation. At Wangari Global, our five core principles drive risk-taking, relentless value creation, and uncompromising learning, all while aligning sustainability with financial performance. This article breaks down what kind of culture we’re building: one that thrives on scrappy execution, ESG impact, and a refusal to settle for mediocrity. If you're in finance or ESG, these values might just challenge how you think about delivering results in your institution.
Great startups don’t just happen—they are built on principles that guide every decision. Strong company values can be its greatest strength or its biggest weakness. Good values, well communicated, become a machine for revenue and for happy customers. Bad values, or the absence of values at all, results in chaos.
A startup is a human endeavor which is created to help other humans in a marketplace. As such, it needs some structure to help it operate. Culture is that structure. As Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, put it like this: “Culture is what remains after you subtract out the people.” Values are guiding principles that help make decisions when the boss is not in the room.
I saw culture-building firsthand during the year I spent as a climate risk modeler at Axa Climate. It is essentially a 200-person startup operating within a large insurance group. During my time there, they changed there mission from “helping businesses adapt to climate change” to “make regenerative universal.” As a reflection of this, their culture is rooted in regenerative business.
This is quite a challenging choice; entire volumes of books have been written about regenerative business, and the resulting culture is rather complex. Nevertheless, it works for them, as evidenced by successes such as their Climate School course offerings and their Altitude software suite.
Wangari Global is establishing a different culture. It is a lot less complex than regenerative business principles, but retains the notion that nature and human communities around the world are stakeholders in all that we do. This is a rarity in the financial service industry, but in our opinion it is necessary. We need small groups like Wangari to influence others, and help them succeed even more than they currently do.
For me, the importance of values is deeply personal. I essentially spent my youth being either a complete outsider or the centerpiece and de-facto leader of a small tribe of friends. Only during a few years in-between did I experience what it’s like to be an equal member of a social group. I’ve therefore been thinking about how groups are formed, why they exist, and about their advantages and disadvantages for a very long time.
It can be uncomfortable to be an outsider, but it gives you a unique perspective. Being the leader of a group gives you some power, sure, but it comes with so much responsibility that it's hardly as sexy as people might think it is. Being equal contributor to a group can be a very nice spot—but only if your values align with that of the group, and when you have the feeling that you're truly adding something unique to the group and profiting off it in equal measures.
Research from Stanford University shows that strong culture drives a group’s success. A year after we started Wangari—a year filled with heartwarming exchanges with customers, exciting technological developments, and many entrepreneurial ups and downs—it is therefore time to coin our own culture.
Value #1—Freedom and Responsibility
At Wangari Global, we believe that innovation thrives in an environment where individuals are empowered to take risks and own their decisions. Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin: the freedom to experiment, innovate, and make impactful choices comes with the responsibility to act in the best interest of the company, clients, and stakeholders.
This value is inspired by Reed Hastings’ approach at Netflix, as outlined in his book No Rules Rules. Freedom is not about chaos or an absence of structure. It is a way of enabling people to make decisions without being micromanaged. At Wangari, we trust our team members to make bold bets, even if they fail occasionally. Mistakes are part of growth, but accountability means we learn from them and bring home more wins than losses.
For example, when developing ESG-integrated financial models, our team members often need to navigate incomplete datasets or conflicting priorities from clients. Instead of waiting for explicit instructions, they have the freedom to try new methodologies, experiment with innovative algorithms, or consult external experts. But this freedom comes with a duty: to communicate results transparently, reflect on what worked (and what didn’t), and ensure resources are used wisely.
Beyond internal processes, our ability to make judgment calls and act decisively ensures that clients get real value from our solutions, without unnecessary delays or over-engineered processes.
We are well aware that this type of culture is not for everyone. Some people feel overwhelmed with so many options, and would rather be told what to do—and that’s okay. We aim to be an organization of individuals that like to feel both empowered and accountable—because, for us, that is where innovation is created.
Value #2: Customer Obsession
Yes, we copied this one from Amazon. It might not be the first company to come into mind when you’re thinking about Wangari, but our opinion they got this one right.
The very reason we exist as a business is our capability to make customers happy. No customers, no Wangari. Period.
That being said, our customers are not just those we sign contracts with. Nature and human communities must profit also off every product we create and every transaction we realize.
For our annual and quarterly goals, we do not just count revenue and the number of customers we’ve made happy. We also track the net contribution that we make on sustainability by assessing how much money would have gone into less sustainable businesses if we didn’t exist. (And of course we track on how much ROI our clients would have missed out without us!)
At Wangari, customer obsession is more than a principle—it’s a commitment to putting people, nature, and communities at the heart of our business. When our clients succeed, so do the ecosystems they touch. That’s the kind of legacy we aim to build.
Value #3: Frugality
We are not about cutting corners. But we’re also not the type of business that deploys millions to add some final varnish on an already-perfect product, if we don’t know that such a varnish makes the value for our customers tangibly better.
We value trying small things with small cohorts of pilot customers. We value running lots of experiments and failing constantly. Then, when we hit on something that sticks, we can scale it up and deploy enough resources to make it an exceptional experience for every one of our customers.
Our customers, and the wider world, doesn’t need more waste. What they do need is sustainable impact. This is our one job, and if flashy marketing campaigns distract from that, we won’t do them. (If they actually work, we’ll absolutely go flashy though! Whatever makes us reach our clients’ goals.)
Value #4: Value First
Beyond minimizing waste, we want to make sure we solve our customers’ most pressing problems first. We can polish up the rest later. If a product is scrappy, imperfect, or even buggy but solves an urgent problem exceptionally well, we consider that a win.
The hard part is solving the problem. Making it nice is, well, nice—and we want our customers to feel nice. But first of all, we want to make them problem-free. And that means delivering real business value before anything else.
At Wangari, we’re proud that we give more than we take. For example, we often charge market- or even premium rates, but we do so because our products and services truly blow our customers’ socks off.
In monetary terms, we’re a profit-driven company just like everyone else. But when we factor in how all stakeholders benefit from our work, then we hope we always deliver ten times more than we earn.
Value #5: Continuous Learning
We all make mistakes, but we work on building systems together that avoid making mistakes we can’t learn much from. Typos, dumb software bugs, and embarrassing dress ties are all dumb mistakes! On the other hand, we are constantly designing systems to run experiments every day and learn from our customers’ behavior.
These experiments might succeed or they might fail. Either way, we’ll have learnt something. We’re operating under plenty of uncertainty, and we never know our customers, emerging tech, and the regulatory landscape as well as we think we do. Thus, we have to learn constantly.
We beat with the pulse of the market. We adapt when that is necessary. We make a bad hypothesis, fail, and get back up again. Does that sound geeky? Sorry, not sorry.
The Bottom Line: Values Help Us and Those Around Us Thrive
Great startups are built on principles that guide every decision. At Wangari Global, our values are not just a collection of words—they’re the living structure that helps us thrive as a group. Our values might evolve a bit over time; nevertheless they should endure much longer than any strategic decision. Culture eats strategy for breakfast after all.
We’ve chosen a simpler framework than regenerative business principles, our commitment to treating nature and communities as stakeholders ensures that our work resonates beyond financial metrics.
Reflecting on my personal journey, I’ve seen firsthand how groups succeed when their values align with the individuals within them. Whether you’re leading a team, contributing as an equal member, or creating space for others to thrive, shared values are the glue that holds it all together.
At Wangari, we strive to balance freedom with responsibility, obsess over delivering value, and constantly learn from our experiments. These principles not only guide us internally but also shape how we deliver transformative results to our clients and their stakeholders.
Our values are our compass today, and they will adapt as we grow, always keeping us true to our purpose: to help others thrive, whether they’re clients, employees, or the ecosystems and communities around us. They’ll form the key tenet of our culture—our behaviors will do the rest.
Good culture is never static—it is as alive as the people and systems they serve. For us, that’s the essence of building something that lasts.
What We’re Reading at Wangari
Culture Slop is about how we’re being swamped by slop—low-quality, AI-generated, mass-audience-optimized content. The limits of generative AI are slowly becoming visible. While it is great at some things, models collapse when they’re retrained on their own content. As human writer
writes, while this influx of digital garbage is frustrating, it is also a great opportunity for genuine human creators to shine.Being a founder myself, I do think that a lot of what venture capitalists say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, much of what
writes in Startup Hunger Games rings true. Focus on hiring the best people possible, adjust in the rhythm of the market you’re in, and always look at the data before you make decisions. Sounds obvious but it’s worth a read and re-read.Entrepreneurship sounds glamorous, but it is stony on most days.
has some whole hearted advice when he says, “success isn't only measured by the numbers, but by the lives you touch and the courage you display along the way.” His piece The Startup Grind is a reminder that success is never easy, and that it takes resilience and (lots of) adaptation skills to make it in this game.