Fireside Chat: Culture Is the Product — Leading Teams That Scale and Last with Bruce Wang (Director, Games Platform Engineering @ Netflix)
What makes some teams ship magic and others ship chaos—even when both have talent?
Join Stanford Founders for an intimate fireside chat with Bruce Wang, Director of Engineering at Netflix and a veteran founder, platform leader, and early-stage advisor. Bruce has led engineering orgs across startups and scaleups, from co-founding Twistage to helping shape the engineering culture behind Netflix Games. In this session, we’ll dive deep into the invisible force that drives lasting outcomes: culture.
Whether you’re 2 people or 200, how you build your team matters more than what you build. Together, we’ll unpack:
Why culture is your real product, especially in the early days
The paradoxes of scaling a high-trust team
Why every core value creates tension—and how to resolve it
What Netflix got right (and wrong) about culture
Tactical ways founders can write, live, and evolve their culture
This isn’t theory. It’s grounded, hard-won lessons from someone who’s scaled orgs, supported dozens of AI and SaaS startups, and learned how to keep teams caring, shipping, and growing—even as the mission changes.
📍 Open to founders, builders, and anyone shaping early-stage teams.