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fastcompany.com | Article Link | by First Round Review

When Molly Graham joined Facebook in 2008, the company still felt scrappy. With 400 employees serving 80 million users, people were so busy “moving fast and breaking things” that the culture still needed to be defined.

Graham was hired to help make this happen--to not only tell the company’s story externally, but to build a shared vision and identity as it grew from 400 to thousands of employees. She started by asking two questions:

Who do we want to be when we grow up?How do we talk to people outside about what it’s like to work at Facebook?

Since then, these two questions have formed the foundation of Facebook’s culture discussions. Most notably, they resulted in the “hacker” identity that has distinguished the company as a technology powerhouse that is always experimenting to bring the world closer together.

At First Round’s recent CEO Summit, Graham, who managed Culture and Employment Branding at the company for two years--and who now runs business operations for slick, modern word processor Quip--talked about what startup founders have to gain from defining culture early and often, and how to do this when there are dozens of competing priorities.

For Facebook and Graham, culture was all about staying true to the company's early identity and giving people the momentum to stay creative through hyper-growth. So she pulled as many other people into the process as she could.

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