Amy Zimmerman, Chief People Officer at Relay Payments - Creating an Intentional Culture

On a recent episode of Reimagining Company Culture, the conversation turned to building an intentional culture from scratch as the company scales. The guest, Amy Zimmerman, brought direct experience to the topic from their day-to-day work, and the conversation moved past the talking points most People teams have heard a hundred times. This recap pulls the practical thread of the discussion together and translates it into the workflows HR leaders are running today.

Amy's background sets the context for how Amy thinks about this work. Amy joined Relay Payments in 2020 to support their explosive growth plans. She was hired to establish their people function and build it from the ground up. During this time, they have grown from fewer than 10 team members to over 160+ globally. Relay Payments is a mission-driven, Series C, venture-backed start-up in the fintech space, headquartered in Atlanta, GA. They are bui. That experience shapes the perspective the episode brings to building an intentional culture from scratch as the company scales, and the recap below stays grounded in the workflows leaders are running, not abstractions.

The conversation touches on the basics any People team is already managing, including values statement design and vision statement design. The recap below assumes that grounding and focuses on the operating moves leaders make on top of it.

Most of the framework below holds up across industries and company stages. The specifics vary; the underlying mechanics rarely do.

What intentional culture looks like during 10x growth

Most cultures are not built. They accumulate. The first ten employees set the unspoken norms, the next fifty inherit them, and by the time anyone tries to formalize them at 200 employees, the norms have already calcified into things nobody can defend out loud.

Amy joined Relay during fast growth specifically to interrupt that pattern. McKinsey research on culture in new businesses research is consistent, companies that intentionally name their culture before scale outperform companies that try to retrofit it. The key is documentation, repetition, and willingness to lose people who do not match the named culture.

How leaders work through building an intentional culture from scratch as the company scales

When should you start writing down your culture?

Before headcount 50. After 50, the people you hire start hiring people you have not met, and the unwritten norms spread faster than you can correct them. McKinsey research on people-led hypergrowth research found that hypergrowth companies that defined their culture early retained employees nearly twice as long as companies that did not.

Writing it down does not mean a 40-page playbook. It means three to five values with concrete behavioral examples, refreshed annually.

How do you keep culture honest at scale?

By promoting and firing on the values, not just the OKRs. Cultures get diluted when high performers who violate the values keep getting promoted. The signal employees take is that the values are decoration.

The hardest culture decision is firing a top performer who is also a culture problem. Companies that do it once tell that story for years. Companies that do not, lose their culture in 18 months.

What actually works in practice

The pattern across companies that handle building an intentional culture from scratch as the company scales well comes down to three operational habits.

• Write the values before headcount 50. Three to five, behavioral, with examples. Anything broader is a poster, not a tool.
• Tie performance reviews to values, not just outcomes. If values do not affect ratings, values do not affect behavior. Culture follows compensation.
• Make the founder tell the story repeatedly. Founders underestimate how much repetition culture requires. By the time you are tired of telling the story, half the company has heard it once.

None of these are aspirational. They are checklists the strongest People teams run on a cadence, and the consistency is what makes the difference.

What looks like a culture decision from the outside is usually the cumulative effect of those three habits, applied without theatrics.

This pattern shows up alongside familiar tools like talent management practices. The combination is what makes the operating model durable.

Where Employee Relations fits

AllVoices company culture solution programs at scale rely on early signals. AllVoices pulse surveys catch the drift between the named culture and the lived experience. AllVoices data and insights dashboard surfaces the patterns that name themselves, high performers leaving the same team, complaints clustering under the same manager, engagement declining in a specific cohort.

The companies pulling this off rarely run it on memory. They run it on infrastructure. AllVoices HR case management platform centralizes the case data; AllVoices data and insights dashboard surfaces the patterns nobody catches manually; AllVoices Vera AI co-pilot for ER teams accelerates the response time so the work is finishable. Together they cover the operating layer that this episode keeps pointing at.

How does ER protect culture during hypergrowth?

By scaling intake before scaling headcount. The companies that struggle in growth are the ones whose intake channels were designed for 50 people and broke at 500. AllVoices speak-up hotline channels and AllVoices HR case management platform workflows have to scale ahead of the workforce, not behind it.

The supporting research is consistent. Independent analysis from McKinsey research on people-led hypergrowth points the same direction the episode does. The combination of operating discipline and outside data is what gets People leaders past the slogan stage.

For a concrete example of how this plays out at scale, look at Intercom's people-first culture story, which shows the same operational pattern in a real customer environment.

The takeaway holds across companies of different sizes and industries. The teams that turn this episode's lesson into operating practice are the ones that name a target metric, run it on a cadence, and refuse to let activity stand in for outcomes. The metric does not have to be elaborate. It has to be visible to the people who can move it, and reviewed often enough that nothing falls off the radar for a quarter.

The other consistent pattern is that the work compounds. Year one of any of these practices feels like overhead. Year three is when the retention, engagement, and case-data signals start telling a clearly different story. People leaders who hold the line through the early part of the curve tend to be the ones who have the receipts when leadership asks for evidence later.

Frequently Asked Questions About Building An Intentional Culture From Scratch As The Company

How many values should a startup have?

Three to five. Anything more becomes a poster nobody reads. Each value should come with two or three behavioral examples to make it usable in performance reviews.

Can you change culture once it's set?

Yes, but slowly. Culture change takes 18 to 36 months even with leadership commitment, and it usually requires turnover at the top of the organization. Most attempts at culture change fail because leaders run out of patience.

Should remote-first companies handle culture differently?

The mechanics change but the principles do not. Remote-first companies have to invest more heavily in written norms, async rituals, and explicit onboarding. The values themselves stay the same.

What's the role of founders after the values are set?

Repetition. Founders who think they have said it enough have usually said it about 30 percent of the times needed. The values get diluted in retelling, and only the founder voice can refresh them at the source.

How do you measure culture health?

Engagement scores, regrettable attrition, manager NPS, and the rate at which values show up unprompted in employee writing. Each one is a partial picture; together they triangulate.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Amy's playbook at Relay is the same one that works at every fast-growth company. Define it early. Hire to it. Promote on it. Fire on it. Repeat it past the point of self-consciousness.

Cultures that survive scale do so because someone made it their job to keep them honest.

See how AllVoices supports the kind of culture work this episode is about.