Every venture capitalist claims to invest in “teams, not products.” It’s the industry’s most repeated line, and mostly it’s nonsense! A polite way of saying we backed something we couldn’t quite model. But occasionally you meet a founding team where the phrase actually means something, and you spend the next few years watching them prove it.
Mastercard’s $1.8bn acquisition of BVNK has now closed. Concentric first invested at a valuation of around $4m. I could write about stablecoin rails, regulatory arbitrage, or the sudden respectability of digital assets in the eyes of the world’s card networks, all legitimate stories. But none of them is the real one. The real story is that Jesse Hemson-Struthers, Donald Jackson and Chris Harmse built a culture so strong it functioned as an operating system, and everything else: product velocity, hiring quality, commercial traction, and ultimately a nine-figure multiple on our entry price, followed naturally from that foundation.
The thing everyone agrees is important and nobody does anything about
Lou Gerstner, who dragged IBM back from the edge in the 1990s, put it plainly: “culture isn’t one aspect of the game, it is the game”. Peter Drucker is credited with the punchier version: “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Both quotes appear on approximately every startup wall in Europe, usually in a sans-serif font next to a beanbag.
Which is precisely the problem. Culture has been so thoroughly claimed by the HR-poster industrial complex that founders have stopped taking it seriously as an operational discipline. It gets filed alongside offsites and branded hoodies: pleasant, soft, something to sort out after Series B when there’s budget.
This is a category error, and an expensive one. In my experience of sitting on boards for the better part of two decades, culture is the single highest-leverage variable a founder controls, and it is set in the first eighteen months whether they intend it or not. You do not “implement” culture later. You either build it deliberately at fifteen people, or you inherit whatever accidentally accreted, and by then it is load-bearing and you cannot remove it without collapsing the building.
Where does it rank? I would put it above product strategy and just below market timing. You can pivot a product. You cannot pivot a culture.
Why it’s so hard
Culture is hard because it is not what you say. It is what happens when nobody is watching, and specifically what happens when there is a conflict between your stated values and your commercial interest. Every company says it values transparency, right up to the quarter where the numbers are bad. Every company says it’s a meritocracy, until the founder’s mate from university needs a job title.
Culture is the residue of your decisions under pressure. Which means it can’t be delegated to a Head of People, can’t be written into a deck, and can’t be retrofitted.
Founders fail at this in predictable ways. They confuse culture with perks, the padel court is not a value system. They confuse it with niceness, building environments so conflict-averse that nobody tells the truth about the roadmap. They hire fast under investor pressure and lower the bar, not realising that a single mis-hire at forty people does more cultural damage than three months of missed targets. They let the founding team drift out of alignment and assume the organisation won’t notice, when in fact the organisation notices immediately and starts picking sides. And most commonly, they simply stop paying attention, because culture never shows up as a line item and there is always something more urgent.
What BVNK actually did
The BVNK founding team was aligned in a way that is rarer than it sounds. Not identical, genuinely complementary, with clear lanes and no ambiguity about who owned what. Three founders, three domains, one direction of travel.
Jesse Hemson-Struthers, as CEO, built for decentralised autonomy. His instinct was to push decisions down and out, prioritising speed and independence over control. The leadership job, as he framed it, was less about direction-setting theatre and more about barrier removal, finding whatever was slowing a team down and killing it. The test of this isn’t how it feels at thirty people, when everything is fast because everything is small. The test is whether the agility survives contact with major corporate milestones, funding rounds, regulatory expansion, and eventually acquisition by one of the largest payments networks on earth. It did.
Donald Jackson, as CTO, set the technical bar and then refused to move it. He established an engineering culture of genuine depth, an expectation that people understood systems rather than merely operated them, and that hard problems were interesting rather than someone else’s remit. In a sector where a great deal of “crypto infrastructure” turned out to be a thin wrapper around somebody else’s API, this mattered enormously. It is also the hardest kind of culture to fake, because engineers can smell it in the first interview.
Chris Harmse, as CBO, brought a commercial instinct that bridged two worlds that mostly regard each other with suspicion: institutional FX trading and crypto execution. He instilled a team spirit that was market-intuitive and, crucially, approachable, no small thing in a business selling novel financial infrastructure to compliance-heavy counterparties who need to trust you before they can buy from you.
Distil it and you get four things: transparency, meritocracy, shared ambition, collaboration. On paper, that’s every company’s values slide. The difference at BVNK was enforcement.
Consider the hiring bar. Only top 1% of candidates made it into BVNK. Not because the team enjoyed rejecting people, but because they understood that a hiring bar is the only real cultural mechanism a scaling company has. Everything else is commentary. Combine that with genuinely high expectations of people, high demands, clearly stated, consistently applied, and you get an environment that is demanding without being brutal, and collaborative without being soft. It is a very narrow needle to thread. Most companies pick one failure mode or the other.
The outcome is the bit investors care about: retention of exceptional people, decisions made in days rather than quarters, and the sort of organisational trust that means a team ships during an acquisition process rather than updating their LinkedIn.
Selling a company with a strong culture
Here is the underappreciated commercial point. Culture is not merely a growth input; it is an exit asset.
Any serious acquirer conducts diligence on people. They are attempting to work out a single thing: after we write the cheque, will the value we just bought walk out of the door? A company with a coherent, founder-set culture and a demonstrably high hiring bar answers that question favourably before the conversation even starts. It compresses diligence, it reduces the perceived integration risk, and it materially affects the multiple.
Cultural excellence made BVNK acquirable, not just valuable. Mastercard was not buying a stablecoin payments product in isolation. It was buying a team that had proved, repeatedly and under pressure, that it could execute at speed in one of the most regulatorily fraught corners of financial services.
So the next time a founder tells me they will get to culture after the next round, I will point them at three South Africans who understood the assignment from day one, built a world-class team, fostered a world-class culture around it, and turned a $4m valuation into $1.8bn.
Culture monsters, the lot of them. Gerstner was right, it is the game.
