The memo nobody sent
In a previous piece, I wrote about how a startup’s operating system has to change as the business scales — the shift from founder-led improvisation to distributed accountability, from 1.0 to 2.0. But there’s a question that sits underneath all of that, one that rarely gets asked directly: what is the company now for?
Most founders build with a clear, if often unstated, sense of what success looks like for them personally. That’s their version of shareholder value, and it’s usually quite specific. Some built to exit. Some built to be the definitive name in a space. Some built a company that gave them the lifestyle and independence they wanted, and nothing more. Some built to prove a point, or to write a book, or because the idea simply demanded to exist.
These are all legitimate motivations. And they shaped the culture more than most people ever realized.
The original shareholder value — whatever it was — tends to permeate everything: how decisions get made, what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, what “good” looks like. A company built around a founder’s vision of a great personal lifestyle operates differently from one built to grow fast and exit. Both can be successful. But they run on entirely different assumptions about what the work is for.
The problem arises when those original shareholder values are still running in the background after the ownership picture has changed.
When a PE firm arrives, or when the founder has sold a stake, or when the business has become part of a larger organization, the shareholder values change fundamentally. The company is now for different people, with different expectations, different time horizons, and different definitions of success. A PE firm is not interested in the founder’s lifestyle. A strategic acquirer is not interested in the product as a personal legacy. A listed parent company has obligations to shareholders who have never heard of the business and don’t care about its origin story.
Teams, though, often haven’t gotten the memo. They’re still operating on 1.0 shareholder values — the original motivations that made sense when the founder was the only shareholder who mattered. A team built around “get the idea out there” will struggle with the discipline and predictability that a PE-backed business requires. A culture shaped by the founder’s preference for autonomy over process will resist the accountability a strategic acquirer expects. Educating a team on new shareholder values — on the reality that different shareholder values even exist — and genuinely aligning goals to them, is one of the most underestimated challenges of any scale-up transition.
It requires more than a town hall. It requires being explicit about what has changed, and why, and what that actually means for how people should work. Leadership often skips this, assuming the change in ownership is self-evident. It rarely is. Most people in the building are focused on their work, not on the cap table.
This gets even more complex when a parent or sister company is involved.
A 3.0 corporate entity — especially one that is publicly listed — carries shareholder values that have been codified, audited, and legally enforced. When a 1.0 or 2.0 business is acquired by, or required to align with, a 3.0 parent, the clash isn’t just cultural. It’s structural. The 3.0 expects compliance, reporting cadence, governance, and predictability. The 1.0 team experiences this as bureaucracy and control. Both are right, from inside their own operating system.
What makes these situations particularly difficult is that neither side is wrong. The corporate parent’s expectations are entirely reasonable given who its shareholders are and what it has promised them. The operating team’s frustration is entirely reasonable given the environment they were built for and have thrived in. The problem isn’t bad faith. It’s that nobody has explicitly translated one world into the language of the other.
Navigating that alignment requires someone who can speak both languages fluently — and who can hold the space between them without losing either side.
The operational transition — the one I wrote about in the previous piece — is visible. You can see it in how decisions get made, how meetings run, how accountability flows. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s concrete. You can point to it.
The values transition is harder, because it’s invisible until something goes wrong. A team that is working hard, producing results, and genuinely committed can still be running on the wrong operating assumptions — pointed at the wrong definition of success, optimizing for things that no longer matter to the people who now own the business.
The memo nobody sent is the one that says: the company you joined is not the company this now is. What it’s for has changed. Here is what it’s for now.
That conversation is uncomfortable. It asks people to let go of the purpose they signed up for. But the alternative — a team running on 1.0 assumptions inside a 2.0 or 3.0 reality — tends to produce exactly the kind of slow, invisible misalignment that’s hardest to diagnose and most expensive to fix.
Send the memo.