How to define early-stage company values from scratch

Executive overview

Early-stage founders often skip values because they have no team yet. You don't need one — you need a list of people you'd love to work with (and people you wouldn't).

Distill the qualities behind those names into 4–6 short phrases. Values built this way tend to scale surprisingly well, even to hundreds of people.

The values exercise

• List 5–10 people you'd love on this team — hypothetically, from past experience
• List people you'd never want — even people you like personally
• For each person, write the quality or characteristic behind your choice
• For negative examples, flip the trait: extract the reverse as a positive value
• Distill all qualities down to 4–6 short phrases (not single words, not full sentences)