Today’s episode is with Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart.

He started as a generalist, running everything from product to payroll, but as the company has grown over the years, he’s come to focus on one particular area: culture. Since Max is also an active angel investor, he’s also been able to partner with tons of founders and help them think about architecting their own culture at the early stages — which is exactly what we dive into in today’s episode.

In the first half of our conversation, we dig into company values. Max shares both the process the Instacart team used to come up with unique values like “Every minute counts,” and his advice for making sure values actually guide behavior. He has tons of creative tactics for making employees feel more connected to them, as well as lots of helpful advice on hiring for values early on. 

After getting into measuring culture and better surfacing feedback from employees, we end our conversation by chatting about some of the pitfalls when it comes to culture — the mistakes that are easy for founders to make, the factions that can develop between early employees and newcomers, and the onset of politics and bureaucracy as the company gets bigger.

There’s lots of great advice here on how founders can take a more deliberate role in shaping culture from the very beginning — we hope you enjoy the episode.

You can follow Max on Twitter at @Max. 

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson. 

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