I was going to start this post with a few links to recent events, but frankly there are so many it is dizzying to do so.  So, I am going to presume if you are reading my blog you are at least a little familiar with what is going on at Uber, including today’s resignation of board member David Bonderman.

Sadly, I see this stuff in startups all the time – unprofessional, juvenile actions and communications initiated by the senior leadership or founders and justified under the guise of ‘we like an edgy culture’ or ‘we were just being funny’ or something like that.

To all of you I’d like to suggest something: Grow up.

Here’s the thing.  All your stakeholders want you to win.  Your investors provided capital (often with limited control) because of a belief in you and what you are trying to do.  Your employees choose to come to work for you every day, over other things they could be doing, presumably because they also believe in that mission.  

And you know what is true about your mission?  It is really, really hard to actually accomplish it.  You are constantly trying to do the impossible, to create products and services that haven’t existed before.  You face ridiculous timelines, incredible competitive pressure, difficult decisions that don’t have consensus, challenges with hiring and retaining your people, and of course the looming pressure of continuing to raise capital to lengthen your runway, all in the service of this mission that you deeply believe in.

With all the challenges you face, why do you need to self-inflict more?

Entrepreneurs I have worked with who have found themselves on the wrong side of these issues usually defend themselves with either the ‘culture’ argument or the ‘its my personality’ argument (and of course those two are deeply intertwined.)  

To that I ask, is it worth risking your mission?  Wouldn’t it be better to understand that these sorts of behaviors do more harm than good?  Can’t you create a great culture without resorting to frat bro humor?  Don’t all these recent events indicate that perhaps these actions are simply not worth the downside?

I’ve written about culture before, but to summarize, culture is about actions and it almost always is created (whether they understand they are doing so or not) by the founders. If you want my advice, you should build the culture that will best serve your mission – one of integrity, excellence, performance, and delivery of the dream.  Anything that diminishes this is shooting yourself in the foot.

Isn’t what you are doing hard enough already?