I’m going to start this post by talking about dishes. Yes, it’s a metaphor. But it’s literal, too.
We recently launched our refreshed company values, in the Culture/Code, at our all-company offsite ‘IRL’ in Berlin in April, which is fitting, since Berlin is where I started n8n in 2019.
Somewhere between the bigger ideas about building infrastructure for a new era of work and what it means to operate with integrity, there’s a line in there about doing the dishes:
“When something needs doing, you do it - from the strategic call to the dish in the sink.”
This might be my favourite line in the whole Code, because it gets at something essential about what we’re here to do at n8n, and how we’re going to get there. But, we’ll get to that shortly.
So why do the values refresh now?
The obvious answer is speed. We’ve been growing fast, faster than most, and we’re in the top 30 projects of all time on Github. Moving at the pace we do is a genuine test of how well a culture can flex and absorb change.
Because culture doesn’t transmit automatically. Every month, people join n8n who didn’t experience the company when it was small enough for the culture to be felt rather than explained - when a thread on Slack, or a decision made in front of everyone, naturally set the tone. That’s not how it works at our size anymore, nor should it be.
The less comfortable reason for this values refresh is me. As a company scales, a founder necessarily gets farther from the day-to-day contact, which used to be the main way how vision and values traveled. I still love meeting every new hire, I just have less time with each of them than I used to, and less of the ongoing back-and-forth and daily interactions that used to follow. I can’t be in every room where a hard call gets made. And as we build out our global team and our US operations - a market with its own norms, pressures, and pace - the risk of cultural drift, or disconnect, is something we couldn’t ignore.
Scale, however, isn’t our central goal - impact and longevity is. We want n8n to be a generational company - one that’s still here, still trusted, and still building in twenty, thirty, and more years. For that to be true, the culture has to outlast the people who built it - understood, inherited, and owned by everyone who comes after.
There’s also the remote-first reality. Building a coherent culture across time zones, languages, and working styles, without the ambient social glue of a single shared office (we do have local hubs in some major cities), requires more intentionality than most companies admit. The kind of informal calibration that happens when people are close to each other - overhearing a decision, reading the room, absorbing how a leader handles something under pressure, or recognising just how central our community is to how we make decisions - none of that exists for us by default. We have to create it deliberately, and the Culture/Code is part of how we’ll do that. It’s not a substitute for real human connection, of course. But it’s certainly useful as a shared reference point that helps us to beat stubborn little things like geography, or daylight savings time.
Our values have always been present in the decisions we made: turning down investors over ethical concerns, letting go of talented people who weren’t right for the culture, treating free users and paying ones alike. But we can’t rely on osmosis anymore - so we’ve written them down.
Another favourite part of our new Culture/Code is We are welcoming. That entire value gets at something really special about n8n: we are a truly global community. You can find people building with n8n on almost every continent. We may have started in Europe, but for a long time, our #1 community hub was in Brazil. If you have a dream and the drive to build something great, you belong here. That’s the only entry requirement we have.
This breadth matters because n8n is a product for everyone: solo builders and global enterprises, developers and the people just starting to learn how to code, teams operating across dozens of countries and industries. And this is why that same inclusive spirit must be protected in our Culture/Code: if the people building n8n don’t reflect the extraordinary diversity of our community, then I fear we will end up building something far narrower, and far less impactful, than we’re capable of.
Importantly, n8n has always been more than a bunch of people with the same email signature - our community of contributors, users, template-builders, and forum regulars is part of how we actually work, and how we’re going to thrive. And this new Culture/Code is a promise to them too: how we show up in our forums, how we respond when something breaks, how we credit the people building alongside us. The same values that govern how we treat each other internally have to govern how we treat the people building with us. Anything less than that is just corporate theatre - and that isn’t us.
The Culture/Code is written in two parts, because a company’s culture has two parts: the values you stand for, and the behaviours that demonstrate how you live those values every day. And the roll-out starts now.
We’re embedding it everywhere, from how we hire to how we give feedback. We’ll ask whether people are living it. We’ll ask people to challenge us when we’re not. Which brings us back to the kitchen sink.
I like the line about the dishes because it’s not about the dishes at all. It’s about the discipline of noticing. Not just the humility to roll up your sleeves but the naturalness of doing so. The sense of community that means you apply effort to something that maybe wasn’t your fault, but you still see as your shared responsibility. Not because anyone’s tracking this stuff, but because leaving it for someone else to do isn’t who you are.
When I read the n8n Culture/Code, I see a mirror reflecting who we are, but I also see a map - helping us understand where we’re headed, and how we’re going to get there, together.
The only thing I don’t want to see… is the dish in the sink.