Talking About Culture Fit Already Means You've Stalled

The other day, I had dinner with members of a startup in Shenzhen, China.

They’re roughly in their third year since founding, and their headcount jumped to around 150 people last year. They were talking up next year, with plans to hit around 300.

I’ve been deep enough in running startups and managing small and medium-sized businesses myself to feel the pain of how hard it is to grow headcount. Anyone reading this who’s close to management, or who has experience managing a reasonably large team, will know exactly what I mean.

Yes, it’s the difficulty of culture fit.

As a team’s headcount grows, the work backgrounds and experiences people bring inevitably diverge. That means well-intentioned collisions start happening everywhere: in a single task, a single meeting, even a single product spec. Both sides mean well, but differences in culture or experience produce mismatches, and friction naturally follows. Prioritizing culture fit is essentially an entry-strategy question. You either bring in people whose intentions are already aligned at the point of entry, or you gather people who are still close to a blank slate and dye them with the company’s culture.

Going from 150 to 300 in a single year is an extremely hazardous proposition. So I asked one of the company’s original members, now a manager, about it.

“How do you think about culture fit?”

His answer was simple. “Well, everyone’s got their own taste in food, right?”

We weren’t communicating. If I said this to someone in a management-adjacent position in Japan, it would land immediately as a familiar story. But this isn’t Japan. I probably needed to explain more carefully.

So after explaining, I asked again.

“As headcount grows, differences in culture and differences in development style show up inside the company, right?”

His answer was still off the mark. “Well, people from Sichuan really like it super spicy. Oh, this restaurant is Sichuan food, but it’s toned down for people in Shenzhen. It’s good, right?”

He did look a little annoyed, though. Since we were both speaking English, which is neither of our native languages, exchanges like this that don’t quite connect happen sometimes. On top of that, we were both a bit drunk by then, and after my fairly long explanation, I threw out a “right? you get it, right?” but in the end it still didn’t land.

He didn’t even go so far as to say,

“What matters is whether people genuinely commit to the mission.”

What follows is just my own impression. I hope it can pass for analysis.

As many people may already know, the first thing you notice when interacting with a Shenzhen startup is how young the members are. The average age at most startups there rarely creeps into the late 30s; it’s typically early 30s or, in many cases, 20s. They’re not just full of momentum, they’re diligent too, and brimming with the will to work 24/7/365.

There’s an extraordinary vitality to it.

I have some memory of this myself. In your 20s, there’s always a certain number of people working at a borderline insane level. There was a stretch when leaving the office at 3am was normal for me. 3am, in the middle of the night. I’d bike the ten minutes home, sleep, and be back in the office again by 10am. I repeated that cycle. I never bothered calculating my pay, and I had nothing much in my personal life to protect. If trouble broke out at an overseas factory, I’d fly out the same day.

Why was I doing that? Because it was fun.

I have another experience like this too: joining a just-launched startup in Silicon Valley as its first employee. Individual decision criteria were vague, nothing was managed, no process was fixed — it wasn’t so much chaos as everything being blurry. But we pushed forward, brushing all that aside. Just build, just ship, just tinker, just put in the sweat.

The chain of command and a certain kind of loyalty were both clear. Follow the CxO on direction. Details flow fluidly on the ground. That was enough.

I’ve also faced the “familiar” friction of division when starting up a company in Japan. Looking back, it was without question a bitter experience, and at the time I pushed forward with the same principle: “Follow the CxO on direction. Details flow fluidly on the ground.” Except this time, I was the one in the CxO’s position. The launch of our first product went well, but afterward, under mounting pressure from division, everything began failing fatally. That was the first time I truly understood the meaning of the phrase “reconciling culture.”

What was different?

At the time, I had no idea at all. Looking back calmly, the reason I, as a junior engineer, had been able to throw myself entirely into working toward a goal, day and night, without calculation, purely, was never because management was good. Of course my boss at the time was an understanding, kind person, but I don’t particularly recall him doing anything memorable. I think I was doing it on my own will, with my own intensity.

Yes, intensity.

During the period when I was being crushed by the pressure of division, what was missing was intensity.

There’s something else I noticed spending time at that Shenzhen startup’s office.

There’s very little conversation.

Almost no conversation happens between employees. Everyone is focused, deep in their own work, but Chinese people aren’t particularly quiet as a rule. So I think it’s probably that there simply isn’t much need to consult with each other.

China remains a country with an abundant labor force. Because of that, division of labor is highly advanced there. I felt that even the U.S. has more advanced division of labor than Japan. Japan, I think, is a relatively underdivided country by global standards.

The downside of division of labor is that employees’ understanding of the business as a whole declines, which in turn makes internal department transfers difficult. I don’t know China well in this regard, but in the U.S., department transfers essentially don’t happen in the first place, so this wasn’t something to worry about there. Japan, again, is a somewhat strange country on this point.

The advantage of division of labor is, needless to say, “deepening.” When a person’s area of responsibility is made clearer, they can pursue that specific category relentlessly without their attention wandering. Efficiency gains, adoption of new technology, cost reduction, schedule adherence — positive effects can be expected across the board. What I was working on during my 10am-to-3am period was, simply, “get this specific product’s unwanted emissions through compliance.” I remember it well. I needed to study, I had ideas but not enough time to test them — no, I just relentlessly did whatever could be done, some of it didn’t work, but I did it anyway, with pride and stubbornness. It was, inevitably, a period when a great deal of knowledge and experience accumulated.

And as division of labor deepens, there’s less need to consult with other members. As a result, you can concentrate on the work right in front of you.

Of course, work done as a team naturally involves layers of division — division across teams, division within a team. But the unit of team management stays small. Five or six people, up to maybe twenty at most. That’s actually a group size where you don’t need to think about culture at all.

Perhaps it’s through this kind of structural accumulation that, even once an organization reaches 200 or 300 people, there’s almost no need to think about culture.

You could also hypothesize that division of labor nets out to roughly zero, since it increases management overhead even as it reduces friction. For instance, one very important thing when dividing labor is that you have to set fine-grained responsibilities and goals for each individual. That means management overhead increases. But on the other hand, it becomes much easier for a manager to understand what that person is doing, which makes it very simple to judge whether results are being produced, and whether improvement is needed. If someone works across multiple teams, evaluating that person becomes difficult. They might be producing hardly any results on one team, seemingly unmotivated, while on another team they’re producing enormous results, full of energy and drive. So how do you evaluate a person like that? Is the scope of work assigned to them going forward even appropriate? These kinds of worries arise. With division of labor, none of these worries exist at all.

Design is hard, but evaluation and correction are easy — that may be the defining property of division of labor. Net zero? No. Perhaps, in total, management overhead actually goes negative, because you no longer need to manage culture fit.

Here’s a hypothesis: in a company with sufficient intensity and sufficiently advanced division of labor, managing culture may become unnecessary.

Anyone who’s spent time in the startup world probably has a little bit of a hunch about this. A startup on the way up typically goes through a situation that’s the exact opposite of division of labor: “there aren’t enough hands, so we all have to do everything.” But that’s really only true during the launch period. In fact, a deep valley of division of labor forms almost immediately. It’s essentially a cluster of single points of failure. Nobody but so-and-so understands the cloud infrastructure at all. Nobody but so-and-so grasps this PCB’s circuit. Nobody but so-and-so has any idea what this spreadsheet means. That’s the situation. But all of it moves the business forward as one mass. Yes, precisely as one mass. At that stage, nobody utters some yawn-inducing line about culture fit.

But at some point, people start picking at other departments’ performance, issues that arise get met with mutual deferral instead of ownership, and people start worrying about a lack of communication. That’s precisely the entry point to large-company disease. If people are enjoying the work in front of them, focused on it, pouring their heart and soul into it every day, none of that ever happens.

At the management layer, the reason sufficient division of labor can’t be achieved is that it isn’t clear what to focus on. If it were clear exactly where the lever lies that determines whether the business succeeds or fails, then pouring resources, focus, and intensity into that one point would be a very straightforward story.

But because that isn’t clear, people end up doing a bit of this and a bit of that.

There’s something I’ve consistently told startups and executives when advising them: “R&D shouldn’t divide time — it should divide people.” This is advice that’s almost never been followed (lol). People just aren’t that versatile.

Management is rarely something you can get through on a single leg. That’s why a portfolio design is needed for everything. And in this context too, the best solution it leads to is division of labor.

The link between division of labor and intensity isn’t especially clear, but it’s fair to say the link between division of labor and focus is comparatively clear. My own experience bears that out too.

In that sense, intensity may be the minimum spark, and division of labor may be like the enclosure you build around that spark. The enclosure isn’t just there to block wind from outside. Apparently, when you build an enclosure around a spark, the air is forced to pass straight through a narrow area from bottom to top, which creates a tunnel effect that boosts the fire’s power. A bit of trivia from my camping experience.

As for whether they’re doing what I’ve described here strategically, I don’t think that’s really the case. But it can be analyzed and learned from structurally. I hope people will learn from it, and that a Japanese-style version of it will emerge.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2026/05/1615/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.