Talking about culture fit means you're already stagnating

They’re about three years into the company, and apparently their headcount jumped to around 150 people last year alone. They were fired up about hitting around 300 next year.

I have some experience with that kind of headcount growth. Having spent a fair amount of time running startups and managing small and mid-sized companies myself, I know firsthand how painful a fast-growing headcount can be. If you’re close to management, or if you’ve ever managed a team of decent size, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Yes — culture fit. That’s the difficulty.

As a team grows, people inevitably arrive from different backgrounds and experiences. That means well-intentioned clashes crop up everywhere, down to a single task, a single meeting, a single product spec. Both sides mean well, but differences in culture or experience produce misalignment, and friction follows naturally. Prioritizing culture fit is essentially a question of entry strategy: you either hire people who already share a certain mindset, or you bring in people close to a blank slate and dye them in the company’s culture afterward. That’s the idea.

Going from 150 to 300 people in a year is an extremely hazardous proposition. So I asked one of the company’s early-member managers.

“What do you think about culture fit?”

His answer was simple. “Well, everyone’s got different tastes in food.”

We weren’t communicating. Bring this topic up with someone close to management in Japan, and it lands immediately as something everyone recognizes. But this isn’t Japan. I clearly needed to explain more carefully.

So after explaining, I asked again.

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

His answer was still off the mark. “Well, people from Sichuan love crazy spicy food. Oh, this place serves Sichuan food, but it’s toned down for Shenzhen locals. Good, right?”

He did look a little annoyed, though. We were both speaking English, neither of our native languages, so exchanges like this that don’t quite connect happen sometimes. We’d both had some drinks by then, and I’d given a fairly long explanation, tossing it out with a “you get it, right?” tone — but in the end it still didn’t land.

He didn’t even say something like:

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

What follows is just my own take. I’d like it to count as analysis.

Many of you may already know this, but the first thing you notice when you interact with Shenzhen startups is how young the members are. In pretty much any startup there, the average age is rarely in the late 30s — it’s usually early 30s or, in many cases, 20s. They’re not just full of momentum; they’re diligent, and brimming with the drive to work 24/7, 365 days a year.

Extremely energetic.

I remember this feeling myself. In your 20s, there’s always a certain number of people who work at an almost insane level. There was a stretch when I routinely left the office at 3 a.m. Three in the morning. I’d bike the ten minutes home, sleep, and come back in at 10 a.m. I repeated that over and over. I never bothered calculating my salary, and I had nothing much in my private life to protect. If trouble broke out at an overseas factory, I’d fly out the same day.

Why did I do that? Because it was fun.

I have another experience like this. I once joined a just-founded 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 set all that aside and pushed forward anyway. Just build, just ship, just tinker, just sweat.

The chain of command and a certain kind of loyalty were clear, though. Follow the CxO’s direction. The details flow flexibly on the ground. That was enough.

I’ve also faced the classic friction of division when I started a startup in Japan. Looking back, it was without question a bitter experience, but at the time I pushed forward with “follow the CxO’s direction, details flow flexibly on the ground.” This time I was the one in the CxO’s position. The launch of the first product went well, but after that, under the pressure of division, everything fell apart to a fatal degree. That was the first time I truly understood what “reconciling culture” meant.

What was different?

At the time, I had absolutely no idea. Looking back calmly now, the reason I, as a junior engineer, could throw myself completely into a goal, day and night, without calculation, purely — it wasn’t because management was good. My boss at the time was an understanding, kind person, but I don’t particularly remember him doing anything memorable. I think I did it on my own will, with my own energy.

Yes — energy.

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

Something else I noticed while staying a while at the office of that Shenzhen startup:

Very little conversation.

Almost no conversation among employees. Everyone works with intense focus, but Chinese people aren’t particularly quiet by nature. So the likely explanation, I think, is that there’s simply not much to consult each other about.

China is still a country rich in labor. Because of that, division of labor is extremely advanced. Even in the US I felt division of labor was more advanced than in Japan. I suspect Japan is a relatively undivided-labor country by global standards.

The downside of division of labor is that employees’ understanding of the business as a whole declines, and that in turn makes internal department transfers harder. I don’t know China well on this point, but in the US, department transfers basically never happen in the first place, so there was no need to worry about this. Here too, Japan is again a somewhat unusual country.

The advantage of division of labor is, needless to say, “deepening.” As a person’s assigned area becomes clearer, they can pursue that specific category relentlessly without their attention wandering. You can expect positive effects across the board — efficiency, adoption of new technology, cost reduction, schedule adherence. When I was working the 10-to-3 shift, what I was working on was simply “getting a specific product’s spurious emissions to pass.” I remember it well. There was studying to do, ideas I didn’t have time to test — but regardless, I just kept tackling whatever I could. Some things didn’t work out. But with pride and stubbornness, I kept at it. It was, inevitably, a period when a great deal of knowledge and experience piled up.

And as division of labor progresses, you end up consulting other members less. As a result, you can concentrate on the work right in front of you.

Of course, work done as a team naturally has layers of division — division between teams, division within a team. But the unit of team management is small. Five or six people, up to maybe twenty. That’s actually a group size where you don’t even need to think about “culture” and such.

Perhaps it’s precisely this kind of structural accumulation that means, even once an organization reaches 200 or 300 people, there’s barely any need to think about culture.

You could also hypothesize that division of labor roughly cancels out, in effect, with the increase in management overhead it causes. For instance, one very important thing when dividing labor is that you have to set fine-grained roles and goals for each individual. That means management workload increases. But on the other hand, it becomes far easier for a manager to understand what that person is actually doing, so judging whether results are being produced, whether improvement is needed, becomes very simple. If a member is active across multiple teams, evaluating that person becomes difficult. In one team they might show almost no results and seem frankly unmotivated, while in another team they belong to, they might be producing enormous results, full of energy and drive. So how do you evaluate a person like that? Is this kind of scope of work even appropriate for them going forward? 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 might be the defining trait of division of labor. Does it cancel out to zero? No — maybe, in total, management overhead actually comes out negative. Because you don’t need to manage culture fit at all.

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

Anyone who’s spent time in the startup industry probably has a bit of a sense of this. Think of a startup during its growth phase. Startups typically go through a situation far from division of labor — “we’re short-handed, so everyone has to do everything.” But that’s really only true in the very early founding period. In fact, a deep chasm of division quickly appears. It’s essentially a pile 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 schematic. Nobody but so-and-so understands what this Excel sheet even means. That’s the situation. But all of it moves the business forward as one mass. Yes, truly as one mass. At that stage, nobody utters yawn-inducing phrases like “how’s our culture fit.”

But at some point, people start nitpicking other departments’ performance, issues that arise start getting punted back and forth, and people start fretting about insufficient communication. This is precisely the entry point of big-company disease. If people are enjoying the work in front of them, focused on it, pouring their heart and soul into it every day, nobody ends up like that.

At the management layer, you could say the reason sufficient division of labor doesn’t happen is that what to focus on isn’t clear. If it were clear where the lever is that determines whether the business succeeds or fails, then pouring resources, focus, and energy into that one point would be an easy, obvious call.

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: “For R&D, you shouldn’t divide time — you should divide people.” This is advice that’s almost never followed (laughs). Humans aren’t that versatile.

Management can rarely be pulled off standing on one leg. So a portfolio design is needed for everything. In this context too, the best solution turns out to be division of labor.

The link between division of labor and energy isn’t all that clear, but the link between division of labor and focus is comparatively clear. My own experience backs that up too.

In that sense, energy might just be the minimal spark, and division of labor might be like the enclosure you build around that spark. The enclosure isn’t only there to block wind from outside. Apparently, when you build an enclosure around a spark, all the air is forced to pass straight from bottom to top through a narrow area, and this creates a tunnel effect that helps boost the fire’s intensity. A little tidbit from my camping experience.

Are they doing what I’ve described here strategically? I don’t think that’s really the case. But it’s something you can analyze and learn from structurally. I hope people will learn from it, and that a Japanese-style variation emerges from it.

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