Codify Before You Scale
Most founders wait too long to define how they work. Jeeva’s CEO did it first—and built a $5M ARR company in under a year.
Brought to you by:
ExactTempo—Leadership Updates that (almost) Write Themselves. Get topic guidance, see what resonates, and stay consistent—with the 1st AI-powered communication system designed for business leaders.
Most startups delay writing down how they work. They wait until things start to break. Until a key player quits. Until the team hits 50. Maybe 100. Then they try to reverse-engineer the values. Or reinvent the operating model. Or launch a “culture reset.”
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.
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:
Create disproportionate value for the world
Move fast (and then move faster)
Obsess over growth—personal, team, and company
Intensity > pedigree
Always stay hungry
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.”
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.
It’s this kind of clarity and momentum that we’re designing ExactTempo to support: helping leaders codify their cadence, communicate effectively, and scale alignment as they grow.
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.
Brought to you by:
ExactTempo—Leadership Updates that (almost) Write Themselves. Get topic guidance, see what resonates, and stay consistent—with the 1st AI-powered communication system designed for business leaders.