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🗺️ Culture > Strategy
👉 I’ve seen enough teams to know strategy is never the blocker. Culture decides everything. I break down why plans fail and what actually drives execution.
Egemen Eres
December 10, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
👋 Hey — Egemen here.
I’ve seen enough teams now to say this with confidence. Strategy is never the problem. Everyone has a plan. Everyone has slides. Everyone has a roadmap that looks good in a meeting.
The real gap is almost always culture.
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Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:
💡 Spotlight: Affiliate Consumer Report
🧠 Deep-Dive: Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
🗺️ Method: Build Training Videos in 1 Minute
⚾️ Catch: Smarter Teams
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Skild
💡 Spotlight
The Future of Shopping? AI + Actual Humans.
AI has changed how consumers shop by speeding up research. But one thing hasn’t changed: shoppers still trust people more than AI.
Levanta’s new Affiliate 3.0 Consumer Report reveals a major shift in how shoppers blend AI tools with human influence. Consumers use AI to explore options, but when it comes time to buy, they still turn to creators, communities, and real experiences to validate their decisions.
The data shows:
Only 10% of shoppers buy through AI-recommended links
87% discover products through creators, blogs, or communities they trust
Human sources like reviews and creators rank higher in trust than AI recommendations
The most effective brands are combining AI discovery with authentic human influence to drive measurable conversions.
Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified by it.
Presented by
🧠 Deep-Dive: Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
You can feel a strong culture within five minutes.
Things flow. People speak up. Stuff gets done without ten follow-ups. No weird tension or guessing games or politics-for-sport.
I think culture shows up in the moments no one prepares for, like a tight deadline or a massive customer complaint or a feature that shipped broken or whatever. These moments expose how people think, how they communicate, and how they treat each other.
You immediately see whether the team leans in or backs away, whether they solve or defend, whether they share information or hold it. None of this is written in the strategy. It’s all culture.
I’ve watched great strategies fall apart because the team couldn’t speak openly. They avoided conflict. They hid delays. They softened bad news. They waited for instructions instead of proposing solutions.
Let me tell you this:
If you tell people “ownership matters” but step in and control everything, the culture shifts.
If you say “feedback is welcome” but get defensive when someone challenges you, the culture shifts.
Culture is built on what you tolerate and what you reinforce. Nothing else.
This is why culture beats strategy. Strategy depends on people.
+ and people depend on culture.
I’m honestly a little heartbroken every time an up and coming startup goes into a massive turnover rate with weird policies and rules and end up eventually failing.
👉 If you want your strategy to matter, work on culture first. Just with consistent actions that show people how work gets done here. Once you set that up, strategy stops being a theoretical exercise and becomes something the team can actually deliver.
🗺️ Method
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⚾️ Catch
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☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Skild
Skild is closing a $1 billion round – it’s the scale of the week!
The team develops a universal "Skild Brain," a foundational AI model that acts as a single, adaptable intelligence for any robot, allowing it to learn and perform diverse physical tasks across different hardware (humanoids, industrial arms, etc.) without complete reprogramming, aiming for "common sense" in robots for tasks from logistics to inspection.
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