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Long gone are the days where a coffee pot and unlimited post-its were considered perks of the job. These days startups are attracting talent with free food, gym memberships, unlimited vacation time and more.

To more traditional business men and women, these “perks” may seem like a frivolous waste of money. In reality, they are born from the company’s values and part of its culture.

A panel of leaders from successful startups like ClassPass, Digital Ocean and SinglePlatform spoke to Cornell Tech students in the Studio about the importance of creating a company culture and hiring talent that fits.

Determine Your Culture Early
It may seem like counting chickens before they hatch to consider what you want your company to feel like with 50 or 100 employees when there is no guarantee you’ll ever get there. But thinking about culture and values early can give you and your co-founders direction.

Moisey Uretsky, chief product officer and co-founder at Digital Ocean, wishes he and his co-founders had talked about culture more in the early phases of their company. “We should have [focused on culture earlier] because we have a large co-founding team with a lot of different personalities,” Uretsky said. “Even though you think you have a clear picture of the culture, if there’s five people and you’re not all saying the same things, then the sixth employee, the 10th and the 50th, are going to hear different messages.”

Wiley Cerilli of First Round Capital, formerly of SinglePlatform and SeamlessWeb, also encouraged discussion of values throughout what he calls the three stages of a startup: family (1-15 people), tribe (15 to 50 people) and organization (50+ people).

“The challenges at each level are very different,” Cerilli said. But at SinglePlatform, he and his team tried to create a culture of positivity and celebration at each level of their growth.

Talk About Your Culture Often
It’s not enough to write down a list of values, or even plaster them all over the walls of the company. In order for values to become part of the company culture, they must be talked about.

Payal Kadakia, CEO and co-founder at ClassPass, emphasized the importance of identifying the values of the company early on and continuing to talk about them regularly.

“We have three pillars,” Kadakia said. “I set them really early on when we were four people…We talk about them. We have conversations about them. They [employees] need to know what the North Star is and if they don’t, that’s where things get miscommunicated and distracted.”

Hire Based on Your Culture
Digital Ocean, ClassPass and SinglePlatform each scaled their businesses very quickly. When hiring large amounts of new talent, the company culture can easily get lost.

Kadakia has tried to prevent this by trusting leaders in her company who she sees embracing the culture.

“As we grew really big, I think it’s important to empower my leaders who I believe are exuding my culture to hire well,” Kadakia said. “I can’t hire every single person anymore…but at the same time, they need to interview and hire people based on the same principles we set at the start [of the company].”

Company culture is born out of company values determined early on by the team. Values may evolve over time, or remain the same from Day 1, but everyone on the team needs to know them and believe in them.