Don’t Kill the Vibe: Scaling Without Selling Your Soul
How to keep the startup spirit well after you succeed
Startups are weird. They’re science experiments stitched together with dreams, GitHub repos, Figma files, Notion docs, and quite often a bit of obsession. They’re chaotic, electric, fragile little miracles.
But when they work — when the thing catches — the chaos starts to change. You scale. You hire grownups. You get serious about systems. And suddenly, the vibe shifts. The spirit that made it magic starts to fade.
This post is about why that shift happens, what it costs you, and how to scale your company without killing what made it worth scaling in the first place.
Why the Weirdos Leave
Let’s start with psychology.
There’s a personality trait called conscientiousness. High-conscientiousness people are organized, disciplined, and good at getting things done. Low-conscientiousness people… are not. They might be scattered or messy. But they’re also creative, risk-tolerant, and incredibly comfortable in ambiguity and chaos.
You can probably guess who thrives in a startup.
Low-conscientiousness folks, especially the ones who also score high on openness (another personality trait which is great in startups and less competitive in scaling and streamlining), are the ones who say, “We’ll figure it out.” They chase wild ideas, poke holes in sacred assumptions, and stay up late following hunches they can’t explain. They’re allergic to org charts. And reporting frameworks. And maybe even you.
But they were your spark. Your raw energy. Your early magic.
As companies grow, though, high-conscientiousness people take over — as they should. You need them to scale. But if you’re not intentional, the culture starts selecting against the low-conscientiousness folks. And with them, you lose your edge.
Low-conscientiousness types are the ones who thrive on chaos itself. That’s resilience. When things get rocky, as they do in interesting times, a cadre on the lower end of conscientiousness is a bolster: coworkers who don’t freak out.
Our advice? In key creative and leadership roles, aim for at least a 1:2 ratio of low- to high-conscientiousness people. Keep some weirdos around: Not because it’s efficient — but because it keeps your company alive.
Stage Theory: How Companies Grow Up (and Sometimes Outgrow Themselves)
Organizations, like people, grow in stages. Each stage adds a new layer of complexity — and each one brings its own form of magic and its own way of forgetting.
This model draws from something called the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) — a developmental framework originally built to map how humans reason, but which turns out to offer a pretty fascinating lens on how organizations evolve, too.
We’re using it here in a slightly new way: not as a hierarchy to climb, but as an ecology to layer.
Primary
The beginning. There’s no strategy yet — just vibes, instincts, and maybe a half-drunk whiteboard sketch that somehow contains everything. Decisions are impulsive but real. The name just feels right. The moodboard hits. The energy is raw, reactive, and totally essential.
Concrete
You start building. A few people believe in something. The culture gets tribal, emotional, bonded. Decisions happen in real time. Someone says, “Just trust me,” and somehow, that works. The organization starts to cohere — not in slides, but in relationships.
Abstract
Now you can name what’s happening. Mission, vision, values. Metaphors show up. Strategy emerges. You start speaking in shared symbols. Meaning becomes portable. The work shifts from instinct to coherence.
Formal
Structure arrives. Roles clarify. You get dashboards, workflows, predictable outcomes. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This is where things scale. It’s the MBA dream stage — clean, legible, and deeply needed.
Each stage builds on the ones before it:
Primary brings instinct
Concrete brings identity
Abstract brings coherence
Formal brings order and scale
But here’s the mistake: thinking each stage replaces the one before it.
When companies forget their earlier layers — when everything becomes optimized, rationalized, and explainable — they lose the messy vitality that made them worth scaling in the first place.
And some companies? They go even further.
Systematic
This is where the org starts sensing itself. Systems talk to systems. Leaders think in terms of tensions, tradeoffs, and patterns. Culture becomes a diagnostic tool. Feedback loops deepen. You’re not just running departments — you’re stewarding ecosystems.
Metasystematic
Rare, but real. This is where the organization gains reflexivity. It can shift between different games to be played by different rules, goals, and metrics of success. It knows every map is partial. It starts designing how it designs. The company becomes capable of real wisdom — not just intelligence, not just scale, but generative, evolving insight.
But none of this is automatic.
You can’t brute-force your way to Systematic, and you definitely can’t KPI your way to Metasystematic. These stages only emerge when the earlier ones are still alive and accessible — when the organization retains its weirdness, its playfulness, its soul.
The trick isn’t to outgrow each stage. It’s to stack them.
You want systems that hum with early-day energy. Strategies that still feel like stories. Leaders who can run a dashboard and chase a hunch. A culture that holds its complexity without collapsing into consensus or control.
That’s how companies evolve — without erasing who they are.
Play Is Not Optional
So what holds it all together?
Play.
We don’t mean ping-pong tables or team-building scavenger hunts. We mean actual play: a cognitive and emotional openness to uncertainty, exploration, and surprise. A spirit of generosity and experimentation. A culture where you can say something half-formed and not get punished.
Play is where new roles emerge. Where good mistakes happen. Where people metabolize complexity and learn to hold paradox.
As your company scales, the truths get more complex. The tensions get sharper. The stakes get higher. If your culture isn’t playful, it will shrink from that complexity. It’ll revert to what’s safe and legible. You’ll lose the ability to evolve.
In a world of rising complexity, play is not a luxury. It’s your evolutionary advantage.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Here are a few practical moves we’ve seen make a real difference:
Make space for chaos. Not everywhere, but somewhere — a sandbox, a speakeasy, a late-night Zoom. Designed ambiguity invites emergence.
Listen at the edges. Who’s thriving? Who’s folding in? Shadow, interview, map the flows. Surface the stuff your dashboards can’t.
Tell your origin story. Not just in decks — but as a shared memory, a felt vibe, a reason to believe.
Build soulful systems. Formal doesn’t mean lifeless. Translate your early energy into rituals, interfaces, and team norms that scale without going stale.
Protect the edge. Find the ones still coloring outside the lines. Give them cover. Let them prototype futures the org isn’t ready for yet.
Ritualize the weird. Hold space for the half-formed, hilarious, and heretical. That’s where the future sneaks in.
Each of these points rests on deeper patterns — not just what people do, but how meaning flows. That’s where the real shift happens.
If you do it right, your company can grow without calcifying. It can scale without losing its spirit. It can evolve without forgetting where it came from.
You can build something rigorous, wild, and beautiful — all at once.
Magic doesn’t scale on its own. But with care, it doesn’t have to die either. If you’re curious how, or want help keeping your company alive in all the right ways — let’s talk.
VIBE LABS helps visionary teams upgrade their organizational culture by increasing collective intelligence, creative resilience, and the ability to metabolize complex truths. We work with startups, scaled orgs, and decentralized ecosystems.