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The Home of Culture Research: The Business of Culture I 2026 I Download Now
Laura Del Beccaro’s Three-Part Framework for Designing Culture Early
I DEEP DIVE INSIDER PROFILES
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The Sora founder has been thinking about company culture since before she had employees. Her framework turns an often vague subject into something founders can actually examine and shape. Long before Laura Del Beccaro had a company to run, she had a notebook about how she might run one.
“When I was starting my career I was always reading about everything company building and saving articles that inspired me. How do you scale a product team to hundreds of people? How do you run a really great one on one? I did not even have any direct reports yet,” she says. “My digital notebook has sections for different topics like product reads or go-to-market advice.
But the largest section has always been about leadership, management, and culture.” In 2018, Del Beccaro got the chance to put that thinking into practice when she founded Sora, an HR Operations platform built to help People teams improve employee experiences by automating processes across the employee lifecycle.
The experience has reinforced something she believed before becoming a founder: culture begins much earlier than most companies treat it. “For me how we build our product interact with customers and scale our go-to-market function all comes back to company culture,” Del Beccaro says.
The problem is that culture is often discussed at the wrong altitude. Founders are told it matters, but given far less practical guidance on what they should actually do about it. It is also frequently treated as a scale problem - something to formalise once a company has hundreds of employees rather than something already taking shape between two founders or a five-person team.
“We all understand what it means to some extent but it is rarely defined or broken down. There are frameworks for product market fit or founder-led sales but when it comes to culture the details are always fuzzier and the advice is less concrete even though it is incredibly important,” says Del Beccaro. “I would argue that culture is actually the baseline for all other frameworks. If you want your company to obsess over product market fit for example you need to engrain that in your culture from the start.”
Culture exists before you define it Del Beccaro’s starting point is that founders do not get to decide whether their company has a culture. They only get to decide how deliberately they shape it. “When you are at 200 people and suddenly realize ‘We have a really bad Slack culture’ or ‘We have no diversity’ you see just how hard it is to correct if you were not thoughtful about it from the beginning.”
That is particularly easy to miss when the company is small. If five people already work well together, writing down how they want to operate can feel unnecessary.
Del Beccaro sees the opposite. “Culture is often overlooked especially at early-stage companies. It is easy to think ‘We are only five people our culture is defined by who we hire we do not need to define anything until we are bigger,’” she says. In Del Beccaro’s view this is a mistake. “‘Hire amazing people’ could mean talented or kind or ambitious. Which are you really optimizing for? Startups often avoid process but a hiring process exists whether you define it or not. It is the same with culture. You have one whether you define it or not but you are not in control of it if you do not intentionally shape it.”
The useful question, then, is what exactly founders should be shaping. Del Beccaro uses a definition from former Gusto Head of People and Sora advisor Jess Yuen:
“Culture is the set of words, actions, and behaviors of a group of people.”
Those three areas became Del Beccaro’s framework.
It is deliberately simple. Look at how people communicate. Look at what the company actually does when consequential decisions are made. Then look at the smaller behaviours that quietly become normal.
Together, they give founders somewhere concrete to look. Start with the words people use
The first part of the framework is communication. “This first pillar is about communication within teams, between teams, and between individuals - essentially how we treat each other when we interact. The frequency with which we talk, the way we talk to each other, the tone we use, how we communicate good or bad news, whether we communicate certain things at all, and the channels we choose to use - those are all essential pieces of our culture,” says Del Beccaro.
For Sora, this has meant looking at communication at a surprisingly granular level.
The company tries to avoid meetings that exist purely to deliver updates. Information is shared beforehand so time together can be used for discussion. Every quarter, leaders are asked to go through their calendars and reconsider whether the meetings they run are genuinely useful to everyone attending.
Remote communication has similarly explicit norms. “At Sora, we try to be available to each other but never expect someone to ‘be online’ at any time of day. Slack responses are not expected immediately. Communicating these norms clearly - and repeatedly - is important, especially in a remote work environment,” says Del Beccaro.
Sora also uses personal user guides, but Del Beccaro is careful about their purpose. They are not instructions for employees on how to accommodate their manager. They are intended to help managers understand how the individuals on their team prefer to work and receive feedback.
The harder test comes when people disagree. “We had an issue early on at Sora where we were too afraid to voice frustration or disagree on certain things, so we thought we had alignment when we didn’t,” says Del Beccaro. “Working remotely can make it harder to confront someone with an opposing idea; you don’t get to walk out of the meeting room with them to make sure they didn’t feel it was personal.”
That prompted Sora to develop shared language for difficult conversations. Phrases such as “The story I'm telling myself is X” give people a way to surface a reaction without immediately presenting their interpretation as fact. For Del Beccaro, leaders should pay particular attention to what happens when the information being communicated is bad.
“How do you find out that something has gone wrong? Are people afraid to bring bad news to leaders?” is one of the questions she encourages founders to ask. Her own method is direct. She schedules one-to-ones with individual contributors across Sora to hear what is happening beyond the people who report directly to her.
“Schedule 1:1s with as many individual contributors as you can - I try to schedule at least 30-40 across the company every 6 months or so. It takes time, and may not scale beyond 50 employees, but again, maintaining culture is the most important thing I can be doing. Listening to employees is the best way to try to piece together feedback and spot patterns.”
Because communication patterns reproduce themselves.
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If your own reports are afraid to give you bad news, you better believe their reports are afraid to give it to them. Then look at what the company actually does. Words reveal part of the culture. Decisions reveal much more.
Who gets hired? Who gets promoted? How is somebody paid? How quickly are decisions made? What happens when two teams want different things?
These systems are where abstract values become consequential. Compensation is one example. Sora introduced standardised pay regardless of where an employee lives, alongside defined levelling criteria for roles. Del Beccaro’s argument is not that every company should necessarily make the same choice. It is that compensation philosophy should be a deliberate cultural decision rather than something that develops inconsistently one hire at a time.
The same applies to progression.
“Who is promoted? Who is hired? Who sticks around?” she asks. One of her suggestions is to interview the longest-tenured employees and understand what has kept them there, then examine what the highest performers actually have in common. The uncomfortable part is checking whether the organisation is rewarding the behaviours it claims to value or simply reproducing patterns around proximity to leadership.
At Sora, managers are assessed partly on how proactively they make decisions about the people reporting to them, including promotions. Cross-functional tension is another useful place to look.
Del Beccaro does not assume that good culture means removing disagreement between teams. Sales and engineering, for example, may naturally pull in different directions because they see different parts of the business.
Sora has tried to make that tension more informed. Engineers periodically join sales calls so they can hear customer reactions directly and understand what the sales team encounters. One engineer came away surprised by how frequently SOC 2 compliance appeared in conversations, providing much more context for security work sales had been pushing for internally.
The lesson is not that engineers need to become salespeople. It is that culture becomes stronger when people understand the reality behind another team’s priorities.
Finally, study the behaviours nobody put in the job description
The last part of Del Beccaro’s framework covers the smaller habits that accumulate around the formal work.
How does the company celebrate? What happens after somebody makes a mistake? What traditions have developed naturally? What time do leaders actually sign off? Do people really take the vacation the handbook says they can take? These behaviours can look minor until they start teaching people what the organisation genuinely values.
At Sora, one example is its “Sunny-Side Up” and “Weekly Scramble,” inspired by traditions at Front. The first recognises something worth celebrating; the second makes space for mistakes. “Celebrating the Weekly Scramble has a very specific purpose — we’re normalizing talking about mistakes. What other behaviors do you want to incentivize?”
An early Sora leadership offsite included a trip to a well-known Taco Bell in Pacifica. The team enjoyed it enough that visiting Taco Bell became an offsite tradition.
“It's ridiculous, but it's a fun thing that we do together and feels uniquely Soran. It’s never too late to start new traditions. Find organic things that are already happening and think about ways to perpetuate them.”
That last point matters. Del Beccaro is not advocating for companies to manufacture quirky traditions because culture is supposed to be fun. The stronger rituals tend to be things that already mean something to the people involved and are then allowed to continue.
The same scrutiny should be applied to less visible behaviour.
Sora schedules messages written after 6pm to arrive the following morning. Leaders take vacation because Del Beccaro knows a generous PTO policy means little when senior people implicitly communicate that using it is a lack of commitment.
“Vacation in particular is something that must come from the top. No one will take PTO if leaders don’t.”
Policies establish what employees are technically allowed to do. Behaviour tells them what is actually safe to do. Treat culture like something you keep diagnosing.
Del Beccaro does not see the three-part framework as something founders complete once.
As companies grow, the words change. The decisions become more complicated. Behaviours that were harmless between six people can become damaging when copied by 200.
For an established company, she recommends scoring the organisation across the framework and identifying where the experience has drifted furthest from the culture leadership wants.
“What would it take to create change in a given area? Creating traditions can be as simple as doing something silly in your next company-wide meeting. But getting leaders to take more PTO may take a lot more effort. Just like a product team would, evaluate the impact and difficulty of every item on your list. Tackle high impact and low difficulty items first and work your way down from there.”
The framework also forces founders to examine themselves. “Bringing self-awareness to your own performance and recognizing the mistakes you’ve made is key. When I started on my journey as a founder, the most common thing I heard was, ‘You’re going to make a lot of mistakes.’ As a perfectionist, I nodded, but for years secretly aimed to make no mistakes anyway - at least related to culture,” she says.
“Now I’ve flipped the script and truly do understand that mistakes are an important part of the journey - not just an inevitable part of it. The cultural mistakes we’ve seen other companies make have helped shape our own culture for the better, and the mistakes we make do the same.”
That may be the most useful part of Del Beccaro’s framework.It does not try to define what a great culture should look like. It gives founders a way to look closely enough at their own company to understand the culture they are already creating - through the words people hear, the decisions they experience and the behaviours everyone eventually learns to copy.