Gaurav Bhattacharya didn’t wait.

When he started Jeeva.ai—his second venture-backed company—he wrote the values, the cadence, and the way of working before they wrote a line of code.

“We were like: we’re going to write a vision statement, a mission statement, our core values—before we build product or talk to customers.”

This wasn’t about being idealistic. It was a direct correction from his first company, where the cultural scaffolding was added late. This time, they weren’t going to make the same mistake. So they codified everything up front.

And they’re building fast: Jeeva has grown to over $5M ARR in just six months.

Here’s how Gaurav—and the Jeeva team—built their foundation before scale set in.

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1. Codify Culture While You’re Small

For most founders, writing culture docs feels like a chore. But Gaurav saw it as a multiplier.

“Everything we care about is everything that we actually practice. It wasn’t an afterthought—it was a foundational piece.”

They defined their six core values as a group. Not as slogans, but as real behaviors they already embodied:

1. Create disproportionate value for the world

2. Move fast (and then move faster)

3. Obsess over growth—personal, team, and company

4. Intensity > pedigree

5. Always stay hungry

6. Hire for founder mindset, not just skill

Then they put those values on the walls of their two offices, into job descriptions, into interview questions, into onboarding, and—critically—into conversations with candidates.

“We tell new hires: this is who we are. Please self-select out if this isn’t a fit.”

It wasn’t about being right for everyone. It was about being crystal clear for the right ones.

2. Overcorrect (For Now)

A lot of Jeeva’s foundational choices came from what Gaurav calls “overcorrections.” He knew what hadn’t worked last time—so he swung hard the other way.

“We used to do monthly releases. I was so hell-bent on overcorrecting that we said: we’re going to do daily deployments—no matter what.”

That level of intensity challenged the team. It exposed where things failed and where their systems needed to improve to keep up with their speed.

But Gaurav doesn’t regret the swing. Not yet.

“Maybe we did overcorrect. Time will tell. But when you’re small, you can afford to experiment. And course-correct fast.”

The key was having intentionality behind the overcorrections. They weren’t just reacting. They were stress-testing new norms early—while they still had the flexibility to evolve them.

3. Culture Is What Culture Does

It’s easy to hang posters. It’s harder to make values visible in day-to-day behavior.

At Jeeva, the culture shows up in decisions: who gets hired. Who gets let go. What gets built. What gets prioritized. How people communicate.

“Ben Horowitz says, ‘Culture is what culture does.’ I believe it. If your early team doesn’t live it, no amount of writing will matter.”

One of Gaurav’s lessons from his first startup was the gap between what leadership said and what they actually did.

“We’d tell people: take vacations, take breaks. But I never did. So no one believed it.”

This time, there’s no disconnect. They’re honest about what the work demands. They don’t sell work-life balance if it isn’t real. And that transparency builds trust.

“We just said: this is who we are. We’re intense. We work hard. If that doesn’t resonate with you, this probably isn’t the place.”

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4. Codify Physical Presence

One of Jeeva’s more polarizing decisions? They’re fully in-person.

“We were 100% remote in the last company. It helped us hire fast. But when things got hard, it was nearly impossible to pivot fast enough.”

So for Jeeva, they picked the opposite constraint: in-person only. And they’ve stuck to it—even when it meant saying no to highly qualified remote candidates.

“We had to turn down amazing people. But if we made one exception, we’d break everything. I did that before—and never recovered.”

The clarity helps. Candidates know what they’re walking into. And the team knows no one is getting special treatment.

It’s not about dogma. It’s about making one hard decision now, to avoid 100 harder decisions later.

5. Codify Operating Cadence

Culture is the “why.” Cadence is the “how.”

Jeeva runs on OKRs in a simple Google Sheet that ties company-wide objectives down to individual responsibilities.

“In our last company, OKRs were an afterthought. Now, they were the first thing we did.”

The rituals are lightweight but intentional:

• Weekly 15-minute town hall to review OKRs (red / yellow / green)

• Weekly written roundup from Gaurav on wins, losses, and learnings

• A guideline that no individual should spend more than 15 minutes per day in internal meetings

Even their QA team found a way to operate asynchronously. Instead of daily standups, each team member posts a morning and evening update in Slack.

“At first, I thought, this is micromanagement. But they love it. It works. And it saves time.”

The result: a fast-moving company that doesn’t drown in meetings—and still knows exactly what matters.

My Takeaway for Founders

Most startup advice focuses on the product. The features. The funnel. The funding.

But the real leverage—the stuff that actually scales—is how you work together.

Gaurav’s story is a reminder that:

• Culture scales whether you define it or not

• Habits calcify quickly

• You can’t retrofit values at 50 people

“It’s so much harder to do it when you’re 20 people, 50 people, 100 people—impossible when you’re 500.”

So if you’re building now, take a page from Jeeva: write it down early. Experiment fast. Make tradeoffs explicit. And build the company as intentionally as you build the product.

But more often than leaders admit, the fundamental constraint on growth is internal.

"The number one rate limiter to growth in a tech company is the organizational capacity for change."

That insight comes from Erik Huddleston, CEO of Aprimo, a category leader in content operations and marketing performance. Before Aprimo, he led six companies to acquisition, helped scale others through M&A, and held leadership roles at Sprinklr, TrendKite, and Cision. He's seen fast growth from every angle, and what happens when companies scale faster than their systems can keep up with.

Erik doesn't just talk about culture, communication, and cadence. He operationalizes them, turning values into velocity and weekly routines into organizational alignment.

This edition of Rhythms of Scale unpacks the system behind his success.

When Growth Accelerates, Culture Must Drive Adaptation

"As soon as you create momentum, everything changes—your problems, your systems, your assumptions. But humans are wired to resist change."

Most human institutions—families, schools, governments—evolve slowly. Companies, especially those in the tech sector, tend to grow rapidly. That speed creates dissonance: teams don't have time to adjust before the next change arrives.

Erik's view is that culture should absorb that pressure, not by softening it, but by making change feel routine.

That's not something you leave to chance. You design for it.

Culture That Enables Change

Erik uses five core behaviors to make fast change feel normal without introducing chaos.

1. Operational Excellence

You can't evaluate a strategy if you execute it poorly. Erik raises the quality bar not for its own sake, but because clarity depends on it. High quality enables faster learning.

2. Cycle Time and Urgency

Erik applies his supply chain background here by reducing batch size, eliminating wait time, and accelerating feedback loops.

"If your unit of value is small, you can test fast, get value fast, and layer gains daily. That compounds."

3. Psychological Safety through a Learning Culture

Erik views psychological safety not as a standalone trait, but as a product of a learning culture—one that normalizes experimentation and makes failure an integral part of the process.

"You want people in the operating room, not on the operating table."

When teams are encouraged to test, learn, and separate problems from people, they develop the confidence and urgency to move fast, even through uncertainty.

4. Intellectual Honesty

"You have to call balls and strikes."

In practice, this means surfacing problems as they happen, not spinning them. Teams can't fix what they won't acknowledge.

5. One-Team Mindset

When priorities shift, you need horizontal flexibility.

"If marketing's behind on lead gen, sales leans in."

This mindset enables people to respond cross-functionally to the business's current needs, rather than just their own function's responsibilities.

Together, these behaviors form a culture that not only aligns people but also prepares them to adapt.

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Cadence as a Flywheel

Erik doesn't treat cadence as a reporting routine. He builds it as a mechanism to drive and reinforce change every week. The week starts with strategy flowing down and ends with feedback coming up.

His flywheel has three parts:

1. Strategy sets direction. Where is value being created? What must change to reach the next inflection point?

2. OKRs break it down. Goals cascade through go-to-market, product, and people engines. They're specific, measurable, and tied to strategic outcomes.

3. Weekly rhythm drives motion.

   1. Monday AM: Executive team meets to make top-level decisions and clarify the week's priorities.

   2. Monday PM: Senior leaders review OKRs, flag risks, and seek assistance in front of their peers.

   3. Tuesday: Staff meetings cascade updates across the org—L1 to L3.

   4. Wednesday to Friday: One-on-ones start to cascade bottom-up feedback through the organization, surfacing insights from the front lines.

   5. Friday: Skip-level conversations supplement that flow, giving Erik another channel for a direct signal on how decisions are landing.

"By Friday afternoon, I usually know which of my decisions were dumb. And I can fix them on Monday."

This cadence isn't reactive. It's recursive. His rhythm creates a continuous signal. Strategy flows down. Feedback comes up. Adjustments happen fast.

Role Clarity Isn't Bureaucracy. It's Leverage.

One area Erik and I both emphasize—because it's so often neglected—is job descriptions.

In many companies, they're outdated or nonexistent. The result is confusion, conflict, and drift.

Erik treats them as dynamic artifacts. But not just lists of responsibilities—structured documents that define how a role contributes to value creation.

"A lot of confusion just comes from unclear ownership."

Each person's role is assessed through three lenses:

• What activities create enterprise and customer value?

• What internal dependencies rely on this role?

• What can we measure to evaluate success?

From this, Erik builds scoreboards. Employees see what success looks like—and how they're trending toward it.

"People should be able to go home on Friday and know if they had a good week."

Clarity isn't just about accountability. It's about confidence.

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Communication Is the Heartbeat of Execution

If cadence drives motion, communication keeps it coherent. Erik builds internal communication with the same level of design he applies to strategy.

The centerpiece: weekly, intentional communication.

"People say they want vision. What they really mean is strategy—and the story behind it."

Every week, Erik reinforces that story through multiple channels:

• Leadership Meetings: Include not just execs but key leaders across the org. These are the people others turn to when they want to understand what's happening and why.

• Skip Levels: Erik updates his skip-level roster quarterly, based on pressure points within the organization. These give him a signal from the ground and let others hear directly from him.

• All-Hands: Held monthly or more often, depending on pace. Erik doesn't just present metrics—he connects them back to strategy, assumptions, and what's changed.

• Async Channels: A structured Slack/Teams architecture supports localized communication. He also utilizes video updates and internal reporting to enhance visibility and minimize ambiguity.

This commitment to consistent communications is how leaders stay visible, strategy stays top of mind, and course corrections happen before misalignment compounds.

Try This in Your Org This Week

1. Ensure your operating cadence supports your values. Where are speed, learning, and candor being reinforced? Which values are floating with no operational support?

2. Create a rhythm that works like a flywheel. Does your weekly operating cadence push strategy forward and surface problems fast?

3. Audit your job descriptions. Start with one role. Is it aligned to value creation? Does it have a scoreboard? Could the person in that seat tell you how they know they had a good week?

Closing Reflection

Growth breaks things. The question is whether you've built a system to respond fast enough when it does.

For Erik, culture isn't what you believe—it's what your systems reinforce.

Cadence isn't a calendar—it's how the organization breathes.

Communication isn't a broadcast—it's how momentum compounds.

If your team had to move faster tomorrow, could they?

Not because they had to. Because they wanted to.

That kind of commitment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when culture is built with intention—and multiplied by design.

Bob Neveu, co-founder and CEO of Certify (now CEO of OurPeople), didn’t scale culture with slides or slogans. He scaled it with a system grounded in two simple ideas:

Hire good people. Then keep giving them reasons to care.

In other words:

Culture = No Negatrons × Human Events

It wasn’t theory. It was practice.

And it compounded—fast.

The First Multiplier: No Negatrons

At Certify, Bob’s culture playbook was simple: hire great humans. And when someone slipped through the filter? They were out—fast.

“You’re in the interview, and you just know,” Bob told me. “You say no.”

There wasn’t a behavioral rubric or psychometric test. There was just a deeply human judgment: Will this person make the team stronger—or drain it?

“We only hire good people,” Bob said. “If there's a $20 bill on the ground and they just saw it fall out of somebody's pocket, they're going to pick it up and give it back to that person.”

That principle extended past hiring. “If someone went negative—on a customer, on a teammate—they had to go,” Bob said. “We didn’t repurpose. We didn’t reposition. We moved on.”

And it worked. By preserving a team of optimistic, integrity-driven people, Bob created an environment where expectations were high and energy stayed positive. Everyone pulled together—because no one was dragging anyone down.

This aligns with findings from MIT Sloan’s study on workplace culture: a toxic teammate is 10x more predictive of attrition than low pay.

Turns out, the best perk isn’t kombucha on tap—it’s not having to work with jerks.

The Second Multiplier: Events as Operating Cadence

The next piece of Bob’s system wasn’t a secret—it was a schedule.

Events. Not as a perk, but as a rhythm.

Certify ran on a quarterly cadence of company-wide moments:

• Q1 Kickoff: An offsite that mixed planning with play. No stale slides—just clarity, connection, and maybe a little chaos.

• Summer Beach Olympics: East Coast vs. West Coast. Actual medals. Actual smack talk. Actual bonding.

• Fall Retreats: Tied to trade shows, budget planning, or team strategy—but always about people first.

• Monthly Happy Hours + Milestone Celebrations: Rituals, not afterthoughts. Baked into the operating plan.

These weren’t events bolted onto the business—they were the business. They created space for trust to form outside the pressure of deliverables.

And that trust paid off. When Certify needed more—travel, nights, weekends—people didn’t have to be begged. “They showed up,” Bob said. “Because they wanted to.”

As Bob put it, “People development at Certify took these four stages to heart: Know, Like, Respect, Trust. You need to get to the Trust stage, but you can’t shortcut it.”

This mirrors research from Gallup, which found that employees who feel “connected” to their work are more likely to be engaged at work.

How It Compounded

Put good people in a room together. They hire more good people.

Then you create the right shared experiences—and trust compounds.

Trust doesn’t scale linearly. It snowballs.

And when it does, the business flies faster.

Which is exactly what happened at Certify. Starting in 2008 with a four-person core team from Bob’s previous company, Certify grew organically to $20M ARR by 2017, maintaining a 50%+ CAGR and powered by 170 passionate team members across Portland and San Diego.

Then came scale: a majority recap with K1 Capital, mergers with three competitors, and six strategic acquisitions from 2017 to 2020. The result? Over $100M in ARR and a global team of 800+ across seven countries.

Bob’s final move? Acquiring a small prepaid debit card company—and rebranding the entire organization as Emburse, where the business continues to scale today.

Remote Changed the Game—But Not the Equation

Today at OurPeople, Bob is still applying the same formula.

And while the company is fully remote, the culture hasn’t gone quiet.

“You lose all the accidental connection,” he said. “Now it’s a negotiation: when can we meet, how much notice do I need, what’s your availability window?”

But instead of rewriting the formula, Bob reinforced the same two multipliers:

• Hiring stayed sharp—gut-driven, values-aligned.

• Events got more intentional.

The company maintains a coworking space. They plan regular in-person team gatherings. They still run off-sites. And they treat those moments as infrastructure, not extras.

“The team still feels connected. But only because we’re intentional about creating that.”

This tracks with what I saw post-acquisition at Gainsight. As a remote-first company, they empowered every manager to run off-sites as needed—no permission required. And they hosted an annual, all-company retreat called Cohesion. It worked.

Culture takes contact. And in a remote world, that contact has to be scheduled.

How to Build Your Own Culture Multiplier

Want to apply Bob’s formula? Start here:

• Define your “No Negatron” test. It doesn’t have to be formal. But everyone who interviews should know what a red flag feels like—and have permission to say no. Bob’s team did.

• Codify your event cadence. Quarterly off-sites. Monthly rituals. Friday happy hours. Don’t overthink it—but don’t skip it. At Certify, it was baked into the calendar.

• Spend real money on trust. Treat team gatherings like product launches. Make them a big deal. Celebrate the team. And budget accordingly.

Culture isn’t a vibe. It’s a system.

Built with rigor. Maintained with rhythm.

Multiplied by people who want to show up—not just log in.

Your Move

What’s one multiplier you can commit to this quarter?

Because the teams that scale best?

They don’t leave culture to chance.

And it shows. thoughtbot operates with clarity, cadence, and culture that make continuous company improvement not just possible but inevitable.

If this resonates, consider subscribing to Rhythms of Scale for more real-world stories from tech CEOs building with intention.

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Running the Company Like a Product Team

thoughtbot doesn't just help companies build better software. It applies those same principles to how it runs itself.

Instead of managing the company through gut feeling and executive decisions alone, thoughtbot built what they call the thoughtbot playbook. This publicly accessible site documents how they hire, build, manage, and grow. However, this isn't a dusty PDF or a static Notion document. It's a living, evolving representation of the company's operating system.

"We don't write things down to never change them," Chad told me. "We write them down because we intend to improve them."

That philosophy drives how the team improves the company. Anyone at thoughtbot can raise a suggestion, add it to the internal idea backlog, and participate in refining it. Topics range from onboarding and benefits to meeting cadence and hiring practices. Once a solution is defined, it's "released" into the company with clear communication, space for feedback, and ongoing iteration.

This process mirrors how they run product sprints with customers. Prioritize issues. Propose improvements. Ship version one. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

While most companies let internal change happen ad hoc—or not at all—thoughtbot treats organizational improvement as a continuous product development cycle; it's not a side project. It's a core function.

Treat Company Improvements Like Product Launches

What happens after an internal improvement is "shipped"?

It gets announced, just like a feature release.

"We treat them like product launches," Chad told me. "When something important changes, we don't just let it live in a doc. We elevate it."

This principle applies across multiple communication channels:

• When a process or policy is updated, the change is communicated asynchronously with clear context, next steps, and rationale, just like you announce a new product feature.

• Team members trust that if a meaningful change occurs, they'll hear about it outside of the issue or working group it originated from.

This structure creates what Chad calls a "promise to the team"—that no vital decision or shift will happen in a silo. It builds alignment without constant meetings.

Create Time to Work on the Company

It's easy to spend all your time delivering for customers. However, if you don't take the time to improve the company itself, the quality of that delivery will eventually suffer.

thoughtbot knew this early on and designed a culture to address it.

They typically work with customers Monday through Thursday. Fridays are reserved for what they call investment time. Everyone uses that time to contribute to one of three areas: the company, the community, or themselves.

That one day per week fuels much of what makes thoughtbot exceptional. People use Fridays to propose internal improvements, contribute to documentation, lead peer learning, or explore emerging tools.

"We realized we needed to create space," Chad said. "Otherwise, improving the company would always get pushed to nights and weekends—or just never happen."

By concentrating customer work into focused four-day bursts, they maintain sharp delivery while giving every team member permission to improve the company, not just operate within it.

Build Cadence You're Willing to Change

A common pitfall for scaling companies is creating rigid systems that eventually calcify. thoughtbot takes a different approach. They expect even their best systems to get stale.

They've designed their core operating rhythm with that in mind.

Each quarter, the company runs its "State of thoughtbot" session. Every team presents what they've accomplished and what's ahead. Financials are shared. A client project is highlighted via a pre-recorded demo or case study. It's transparent, celebratory, and practical.

The company also holds a quarterly "Coffee Chat with Chad," an anonymous AMA-style forum where Chad answers uncensored questions live. The conversation is recorded and shared company-wide.

But they don't cling to these rituals forever.

"In the past, we've done monthly updates. At some point, people stop paying attention. Even good rituals lose power," Chad said.

Instead of forcing a format to work, they rotate, refresh, and revise. Operating cadence is treated like an internal product, too—one that evolves as the company does.

What You Can Learn from thoughtbot

Here are four ways you can apply thoughtbot's approach to your own company:

1. Document how your company works. Forcing yourself to write down your company's operating system helps clarify it, socialize it, and provide a foundation for continuous improvement.

2. Build a backlog for company improvements. Apply the same mechanics you use for product development: a space for ideas, prioritization, and clear ownership for executing improvements.

3. Make time to work on the business. Protect part of your team's calendar to focus on improving the company, not just executing tasks within it.

4. Launch internal updates like product releases. Don't bury changes. Communicate them with the same clarity you'd use in a product release—context, motivation, and what's next.

Your Company Deserves a Roadmap

When new hires join thoughtbot, Chad gives them a simple message:

"If you're unsure what to do, just think about how we'd solve this if it were a bug in our product—because our company is our most important product."

That's not a metaphor. It's a principle.

So, what's the next feature your company needs?

If this sparked something, consider subscribing to Rhythms of Scale for more lived stories from leaders scaling with clarity and intention.

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No matter the stage, the core leadership challenge was the same:

How do you keep a growing team aligned, empowered, and scaling with clarity?

Great product and go-to-market execution were critical. But what led to consistent results month over month, quarter over quarter, and year after year was the unglamorous leadership levers:

• How we communicated with the company

• The culture we shaped and reinforced

• The operating cadence we built to support decision-making and momentum

When those were in sync, growth felt smooth. When they weren’t, everything wobbled.

That’s why I’m launching Rhythms of Scale—a bi-weekly newsletter on the communication practices, cultural rituals, and operating rhythms that help leaders scale deliberately and sustainably.

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Why This, Why Now

Across every business I’ve led—and in nearly every conversation I’ve had with other CEOs and founders—the same challenges keep surfacing:

• How do we keep the narrative aligned as the company evolves?

• How do we turn values into behaviors—not just posters?

• How do we establish cadence without introducing bureaucracy or burnout?

These aren’t just my questions. They’re the quiet friction points every high-growth leader eventually hits.

And yet, while there’s an abundance of practical wisdom around product, GTM, and fundraising, most resources on comms, culture, and cadence still feel overly academic or abstract.

That’s the gap this newsletter is here to fill.

You’ll hear stories from the trenches—CEOs designing communication rituals that actually work, exec teams building culture systems that scale, and operators who’ve cracked the code on cadence without slowing down or burning out.

Some insights will come from my own journey. Most will come from conversations I’m having now with leaders navigating their second or third act—where the stakes are higher and the playbook more intentional.

👉 Not yet subscribed? Subscribe below to get the next edition in your inbox.

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What You’ll Get

Every two weeks, you’ll receive a focused, tactical post in your inbox on how today’s most effective leaders use communication, culture, and cadence to scale their teams with clarity.

Topics we cover:

• Internal communication that actually lands — how leaders keep employees aligned, empowered, and motivated as complexity grows.

• Culture as a leadership habit — how values become behaviors through everyday rituals, not slogans.

• Cadence as an operating advantage — how to set rhythms that clarify direction, accelerate decision-making, and prevent burnout.

Where the insights come from:

These ideas are pulled from real-world experience—not theory. You’ll hear from seasoned founders, CEOs, and executive operators through 1:1 interviews and private roundtables, along with firsthand lessons from my own journey building and scaling teams.

No recycled MBA frameworks. No academic theory. Just practical insights from leaders doing the work—and willing to share how.

👉 Like what you’re reading? Subscribe now and don’t miss an issue.

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Who It’s For

If you’re a CEO, founder, or exec inside a growing company—and you want to scale by design, not by accident—this newsletter is for you.

Because here’s the truth:

• Culture doesn’t scale on its own.

• Communication doesn’t stay clear because you run a monthly all-hands pump-up.

• And the cadence that got you to Series A won’t get you to 500 employees.

Leadership at scale requires intentional design and practice. Rhythms of Scale is here to support that evolution.

Already subscribed? I’m grateful to have you on this journey.

If not, now’s a great time to join us. I’d love to share what we’re learning—and always welcome your feedback, questions, or stories from the field.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in two weeks.

// Steve Cornwell

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