Tim Brown co-founded the footwear brand Allbirds in 2015. Starting with Allbirds’ first six employees, Tim put real thought into how people worked together and how to carry that forward as the company grew. He’s now a venture partner at Icehouse Ventures and a lecturer at Stanford University.

I invited Tim to Ubiquity University earlier this year to talk about building company culture from the beginning. Knowing how incredibly busy early-stage founders are, I asked how he’d respond to a seed-stage founder saying: “I have a product to ship and a VP of Engineering to hire. I don’t have time for squishy stuff like that.”

His answer:

“Whether you think about it and act on it with intention, your organization, small or large, is going to have a culture. To ignore the opportunity to define it is to miss the greatest privilege and probably the biggest source of joy of being a founder in the first place.”

Your first few hires help shape what the company stands for and how people make decisions when you’re not in the room. In this session, Tim walks through three exercises the team used to define those expectations in Allbirds’ early days.

If you’re building a company, I hope you’ll try these with your team. If you’re an investor or advisor, please share Tim’s insights with founders making their first few hires. Read on for the highlights, or watch the full Ubiquity University session at this link.

1. Write a mission statement that can last decades

Tim recommends starting with one sentence that explains why you founded the company and what you want to change. Spend time on the words. You want them to mean something to your team now and still feel relevant as the company grows.

“That statement should have words that you can roll around and own and live in, not just for a couple of weeks, but for a couple of years and maybe in some cases a couple of decades.”

Google is a useful example: its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” You can see how that describes a search engine while leaving room for products like Maps and Translate.

Example: Google’s one-sentence description

This example helps illustrate Tim’s point: be specific about the change you want to make, while giving yourself room to grow.

2. Explain what your standards look like in practice

“Standards are what you walk past every day in an organization. They set the tone for what’s acceptable.”

Tim prefers the word “standards” when talking about company values because it helps people understand how they’re expected to behave.

In Allbirds’ early days, the team wrote three standards. Tim shared one example: curiosity. That could mean looking at clouds and seeing shapes, he explained. At Allbirds, they meant having the courage to ask the question nobody else was asking. A new employee needs that context to understand what you’re asking of them.

At Ubiquity, a standard could be “Get into the innards.” One LP once told me, “It’s like you do the diligence before you even meet the company.” That captures the expectation: spend enough time understanding the technology that you can have a useful conversation with a founder from the first meeting.

Tim suggests including examples of when you missed your own standard, too. For “Get into the innards,” that might be a time we misunderstood a technology because we didn’t ask enough questions, and what we learned from it. Updating those examples each year gives new hires a way to understand the team’s experience.

3. Write a 10-year vision in story form

Tim’s third exercise is to write a two-page story about coming to work at your company ten years from now. What does the place feel like? How big has the company become?

“There's real power in that story format. It gets you away from bullet points and slides and more into the emotion and the feeling of what you're trying to build.”

In 2015, Tim asked Allbirds’ first six employees to imagine coming to work in 2025. They did what he calls a “hot-pen exercise”: thirty minutes of writing without taking their pens off the paper. He encouraged them to include the mistakes they imagined making along the way. I liked that detail because it gives the team room to talk about what might go wrong, even while imagining success.

Allbirds shared the story, along with its mission statement and standards, under NDA with every interview candidate for the first eight years. People could see what the team wanted to build before deciding whether to join.

Watch the full conversation:

How to make it stick

Once you’ve written these documents, you need to use them in everyday decisions. Tim points to the questions you ask in interviews, how you handle someone leaving, how you decide pay and promotions, and how you set goals for the year.

“This thing can't sit on a shelf. It has to be injected into the rhythm of how you lead the organization.”

If you’re making your first few hires, start with your interview questions. What could you ask that would help you understand whether a candidate meets the standards you’ve written down? Watch the full session on Ubiquity University

Tim goes deeper on the hot-pen exercise, how to handle the annual refresh, and how to use standards as a hiring and firing framework from day one.

Watch Here