Legit entrepreneurs ship fast as fuck and aren’t afraid to look ugly. If your shit isn’t ugly you waited too long to get an information event (Figma is one potential exception I can think of to this rule).
Legit entrepreneurs go out of their way to get difficult feedback and have their baby called ugly. It’s a rare personality type to want to feel consistently humbled all the time. This personality type usually leads to incredible products and experiences that seem like overnight successes 5-10 years later.
It’s easy to screen for this personality type in founders too. It’s a personality type with a natural proclivity to curiosity and solutions as opposed to being defensive and needing to be right.
Speed is everything because you can recover from just about any mistake at a company except for being slow. Having a slow culture is downstream of being afraid and that dog just doesn’t hunt.
Having a slow culture is like admitting defeat to the World because you’re afraid but you have to wait years to realize you lost from being afraid. Slow cultures tell everyone at the company that it’s acceptable to be slow and the culture will degrade to going even slower when the speed bar is lost.
So go fast. No one thinks about you as much as you think they do. Go fast and get as much information as fast as possible. Go fast so you can see who at your company wants to go faster.
That’s the culture you want.