Jul 26, 2026 · 6 min read
People first, company second
I asked what culture actually means. Almost nobody answered.
I wrote something on LinkedIn today and almost nobody read it.
What I wrote was that the word culture has lost its meaning. Everyone is looking for a company with good culture. Everyone says they are building one. But when people say culture, what do they actually mean? Not the values on the website. Not the offsite once a quarter. I asked what the thing is that actually makes you feel a company is healthy.
Almost nobody answered. I don’t think it’s because the question is boring. I think it’s because most people have never worked somewhere they could point at and say, that. That’s the thing.
I have. Twice, in opposite directions, and neither one of them was whole.
Whatever I learned at Tonkean, I learned on my own. Nobody above me was building me. There was no appreciation, no real investment in who any of us were becoming. We were working hands. Tasks came in, tasks went out.
And I loved it there.
Nothing felt impossible in that building. Together we believed we could achieve anything, and that belief was in the room before you even sat down. I remember the day the new office manager started. Yael. Something changed the second she walked in. I would bring her ideas that had no business being said out loud, the kind you keep in your head because you already know how they sound, and she would listen to all of it. If she liked one of them, she didn’t just nod and move on. She went and found a way to actually make it happen.
We were friends. Not the kind you collect on LinkedIn. The kind where you tell someone the truth about your week and they stop what they’re doing and listen to it. Nobody there had to be told that people come first. It was just how everyone treated everyone, all the way down.
LayerX was the other half of it.
That is where I actually became good at what I do. Nothing shipped just because it worked. We were expected to find the best solution that existed, and we would argue about it until we found it. The processes were good, and the autonomy was real, and not only over the code. Product, support, marketing, sales. If you thought something was broken anywhere in that company, you could go and change it.
What was missing there was the people. Some of them were difficult, and we never really became friends. Nobody had your back when it counted, and I did not understand what that actually costs until it happened to me.
Ilan came back from a long vacation in Japan and decided he no longer wanted to work with Noa. Just like that, after weeks away. My VP R&D told me I should be the one to give her the feedback, so I did. It blew up in my face. She didn’t take it well, and afterward she went around the floor and made sure everyone was as afraid of her as I had just learned to be. And they were. They lied for her. For months after that, almost nobody at that company spoke to me.
The CTO had brought his own friends in to build the thing with him. He lost them, one at a time, over that same stretch of years, until he told people it didn’t feel like his company anymore.
All that excellence, and nobody home.
Now I sit on the other side of the table. I consult for startups, which means I get to watch founders build the thing from the inside, one company at a time. History repeats itself.
A CTO who cannot explain his own architecture when a simple question lands on him, and the engineer across from him goes quiet. Not an angry quiet. The kind where somebody is still deciding whether to keep believing him.
A task handed over with no shape to it at all. Fix the framework support. Nobody says what support means, what already exists, what done looks like. Writing that down would have taken twenty minutes. Watching someone guess at it for four days costs more, and nobody counts it.
Someone staying at the office until midnight to hit a deadline that should never have been set, walking in on Monday still proud of what he built, and being told it wasn’t what anyone meant. Nobody had ever said what they meant. Not before, not once, not in a single sentence anywhere.
A founder calling two people upstairs in the same week they had finally found a reason to hope again, and telling them, calmly, that it still isn’t enough. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Afterward he explained what happened to everyone else in the building except the two people who had actually lived it.
An offer dressed up as generosity. Junior pay, thin options, our angels advised this, we’re building something big here. From a company that already had half its seed committed before anybody signed anything.
None of it is rare. That’s the part I keep sitting with. Every one of these I have seen more than once, in more than one place, with different names on the door.
When I started consulting, and later when I started trying to build my own thing, I finally understood what I actually wanted. It surprised me a little. I don’t want to change the world. That was never really it. I want to change the people. I want the people who work with me to walk out at the end of it as a better version of themselves than the one that walked in.
People first. Company second. Not the reverse, no matter how good the deck looks.
But I don’t think that’s a thing you install once and then stop thinking about. The people change. The stage changes. What was care six months ago turns into neglect without anyone choosing it, and you have to stay awake enough to notice and fast enough to move.
So I’m asking it again, and this time I actually want an answer.
What makes you feel a company has healthy culture?