How subcultures shape startup culture

Startup culture doesn’t stay static. What begins as a handful of people around a kitchen table quickly evolves into multiple teams, each with its own habits, rituals, and even language. 

These subcultures can be a strength which drives focus and identity, or a source of friction if they harden into silos.

Subcultures are inevitable, but whether they strengthen or weaken your startup depends on how you manage them.

From founder’s friends to 100+ employees

In the earliest days, culture feels effortless. Everyone shares the same context, laughs at the same in-jokes, and instinctively knows what matters. The culture is really just a reflection of the founders and their immediate circle.

As headcount grows, things change. At 20 or 30 employees, you start to see different working rhythms between teams. At 50, departments begin to form their own language. By the time you hit 100, distinct subcultures are unavoidable.

This isn’t a bad thing, as strong subcultures create identity and belonging at a team level. 

But if left unchecked, they can create divides that undermine the very agility that made your startup successful.

Culture doesn’t fragment because people stop caring, but because growth changes how people connect.

How subcultures show up in practice

As companies scale, different teams naturally evolve their own working styles, rituals, and micro-identities. 

These styles and identities reflect the pressures, priorities, and personalities that dominate each function.

• Engineering cultures prize depth, autonomy, and problem-solving. It’s common to see in-jokes in code comments, Slack channels for obscure technical debates, or pride in solving puzzles others find incomprehensible. This creates belonging, but can look insular from the outside.
  
  
• Sales thrives on pace, targets, and energy. Rituals like ringing a gong when closing deals or celebrating leaderboards create motivation and buzz. Yet, to engineers or finance, this can look overly competitive or superficial.
  
  
• Marketing leans into creativity and narrative. Rituals often revolve around brainstorms, campaign launches, or even shared memes. As marketing tends to frame outcomes in stories rather than data points, it can be less straightforward for other functions to assess.
  
  
• Operations and finance value precision and caution, shaping cultures of detail-checking and governance. Their job is to mitigate risk, and this can sometimes clash with product or marketing’s appetite for experimentation.

These subcultures are useful as they help teams sharpen their craft and build identity, but there can be risks, as Stanford professor Lindred Greer explains: 

“Subgroups in teams are double-edged swords. They can foster trust and bonding within the subgroup, but they can also create tension and conflict across the larger team.” 

Subcultures give teams energy and identity, but if you don’t connect them, they risk pulling against each other.

Building connections across teams

The solution is to build bridges between subcultures. Strong connections allow different team identities to thrive while still pulling toward a common mission.

Some practical ways to build it:

• Cross-functional projects. Mix disciplines deliberately. When engineering, design, and marketing work in the same product squad, the result is stronger features and stronger cross-team respect.
  
  
• Shared rituals. All-hands, founder AMAs, or off site get-togethers help everyone to reconnect to the bigger picture. Even lightweight rituals such as celebrating wins across departments reinforce unity.
  
  
• Transparent share schemes. When everyone has a stake in the outcome, differences feel less like competition and more like collaboration. Equity aligns incentives across subcultures. 
  
  
• Rotations or shadowing. Let people spend time embedded in another team. A marketer who shadows sales calls or a developer who joins a customer success stand-up builds empathy fast.

Don’t fight subcultures. Weave them together with shared experiences, incentives, and rituals.

Spotify’s squads and tribes

Spotify has been successful in embracing subcultures without letting them fracture the company. Instead of flattening differences, they created a structure where they could flourish.

• Squads are small, autonomous teams with their own rituals and working styles.
• Tribes bring squads together under shared goals, while chapters and guilds connect people with similar skills across teams.

This model means engineers, designers, and marketers can build strong subcultures, but alignment is baked in through tribes and shared values.

“The trick is to balance alignment with autonomy. Too much alignment kills creativity. Too much autonomy kills collaboration.” - Henrik Kniberg, former Agile Coach at Spotify

Summary

Subcultures aren’t distractions from real culture, instead they are part of your culture. As your startup grows, the goal isn’t to flatten differences but to harness them.

That means:

• Recognising subcultures as inevitable.
• Anticipating friction points as teams grow.
• Investing in the connective tissue that keeps everyone aligned.

Get it right, and subcultures become micro-communities that fuel identity, creativity, and belonging while still rowing in the same direction. 

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