culture is the set of shared beliefs, customs, values, and practices that characterize a people, an institution, or a group — and, in its older senses, the deliberate cultivation of land, living organisms, or the mind.
The word carries several senses at once. In its anthropological sense it names the collective customs and achievements of a people. In its organizational sense it names the shared attitudes and habits that shape how a company or team actually behaves. In its personal sense it means refinement of taste and intellect acquired through education, as in "a person of culture." In its biological sense it names microorganisms or cells grown in a prepared medium, as in a yogurt culture or a laboratory culture.
English took the word in the mid-fifteenth century from Latin cultura, "a cultivating, agriculture," from colere, "to tend, guard, till." Its first English meaning was the tilling of land. By around 1500 it had extended figuratively to the cultivation of the mind, though that sense stayed uncommon until the nineteenth century, and by the 1860s it named the collective customs of a people. The agricultural root still shows in cultivate and agriculture, and it is the thread 📝Culture Cultivation pulls when it compares group norms to a fermenting starter.
In startup usage, culture is treated as the layer beneath process. 📝Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of 📝Airbnb, made the case in Don't Fuck Up The Culture, a letter to his team sent in October 2013 and published in April 2014, arguing that "the stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs." Chesky and 📝Alfred Lin, former COO of Zappos, developed the theme in "Culture," a 2014 Stanford University lecture in the How to Start a Startup course. A 📝counter culture, by contrast, defines itself against a dominant culture rather than within one.