Everyone talks about execution eating strategy.
What gets far less attention is what actually underpins execution in the first place: culture.
Too often it is treated as an afterthought, only really considered when problems surface and leadership teams find themselves firefighting internal issues, like misalignment, underperformance, and internal friction.
In my experience, that’s the wrong way round.
If there’s one thing I’ve seen, both building Copilot Capital and working with founders across our portfolio, it’s that culture isn’t something you think about later. It underpins how everything works. It’s part of the core infrastructure.
Before founding Copilot, I had already seen what happens when this is overlooked.
I studied anthropology at university, so I’ve always been interested in how people work and interact.
When I moved from consulting into finance 10 years ago, I was surprised that the sector doesn’t manage or support its people better.
The finance sector is full of highly intelligent, motivated people but all too often, human value is measured solely by the size of your annual bonus.
Career development lacks clarity, difficult conversations are avoided, and long hours are mistaken for productivity.
The result isn’t better outcomes or a more successful team. It’s inefficiency, burnout, and a huge waste of talent and potential.
That experience shaped how I thought about building a business.
What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was just how central culture would be, not just to how a company feels, but to how it performs.
At Copilot, we’ve treated culture as infrastructure from day one.
It is not something abstract, but a set of habits and expectations that shape how decisions get made, how people work together, and how the team improves over time.
In practice, this means being clear about how we operate.
Everyone is expected to take ownership, have difficult conversations, and commit once decisions are made.
We prioritise team success over individual wins, and we try to create an environment where learning and feedback are continuous.
Founders often talk about execution as the key to success. In reality, culture is what determines whether execution is any good. It shapes how openly teams communicate, how they work together, and how consistently people deliver.
Culture = performance
A people-first approach, done properly, doesn’t come at the expense of performance. It supports it.
When people have clear goals, regular feedback, and the flexibility to manage their lives alongside their work, they tend to perform better and stay longer.
We’ve embedded this through relatively simple practices. We prioritise output over time spent at desks, set clear goals using measurable targets, and run regular one-to-ones and quarterly reviews for everyone, including me (my 2024 feedback ran to 20 pages).
We also try to stay flexible where it matters, supporting people’s lives outside of work rather than forcing a rigid structure. Over time, this compounds.
Teams become more aligned and make better decisions, working together more effectively and ultimately delivering stronger outcomes.
The same applies as companies scale. The focus naturally shifts to systems, processes, and leadership hires, all of which are important.
What is sometimes missed is how those hires fit into, and influence, the culture of the business. If you get that wrong, you can end up introducing friction at exactly the point you need momentum.
The right leaders don’t just bring experience. They raise the standard for how a team operates, and they influence how decisions are made, how accountability is shared, and how the organisation evolves.
Culture and performance are not separate. Over time, one drives the other.
Culture from day one
Looking back, I always believed culture mattered but what I did not fully appreciate was how much it would define everything else, from how a team performs under pressure to whether people choose to stay.
For founders building today, don’t leave it too late. Culture is not something you fix once problems appear. It is something you build from the start, and it has a direct impact on how your business performs as you scale.