I didn't really know that culture was a thing until I started working with Christo Davel at 22seven, and that was about 2010-2011. Christo is a serial entrepreneur and is the founder of 22seven, and he's obsessed with culture and how you can craft it.

Culture is what you do consistently without thinking about it. Culture is the heartbeat of a business, it's just the way that you as the founder and your people in your team show up every day and go about their work.

The challenge with remote is that you've got some companies that weren't remote, that were highly relational, in the office, working with each other in person, and that's been part of their culture. They've then had to learn how to be remote. And that is much more difficult than starting remote because if you start remote, remote is the culture. Then all your rituals and all your stories and all the values will be hard-wired into the remoteness.

Culture is based on values. Culture comes from a centre. I believe that culture is the moral compass of a business. It tells you what you're trying to take care of with every behaviour - from how you deal with your customers, to your employees, to whether animals are allowed at the office.

Having a culture that is not particularly nice doesn't make it a kak culture. It just makes it a culture that not everyone will want to be part of. Kak culture is two things. It's either toxic, which can be very harmful to humans, or it's just so useless in terms of supporting you reaching your business objectives that it may as well not even be there.

So, #StartupCulture is some myth that we've imported from Silicon Valley. That's not true, I don't even know if startups in Silicon Valley ever had that culture. I think it was designed by PR people to try and sell, 'Come work for a startup where you're going to work too hard and not get paid enough'.

Netflix is the darling of culture at the moment, on the back of some excellent PR. Patty McCord's book Powerful is a blueprint for me, I learned so much from that. And then I'm reading Reed Hastings' No Rules Rules - I'm fighting with this book, though. I think the temptation is to take that as the new #StartupCulture, to copy and paste it into our startups. And it's just not going to work.

The founders are the original source of the business. Businesses are defined and built on what they want to make happen in the world. And culture then comes exactly from them, because the culture reflects how they are when they show up to work every single day and how they apply themselves to the business.

My view is that culture is scaled in two particular ways. The first is storytelling and the second is rituals. So, once you know what your values are and which behaviours you're trying to entrench in the business as a reflection of the values, then you start to create the rituals.

There are basically four or five steps to codifying culture. As I've said before, the founder is the culture so you need to start with the founder. If you are a founder, just take a look at yourself.