Culture Is the Signal

Crema has built its practice around a clarity most companies only discover in hindsight: knowing exactly which principles are non-negotiable makes everything else easier to adapt. In the age of AI, that organizational self-knowledge turns out to be the most durable competitive advantage of all.

Humans & AI: Founder Series | HumanCulture

When Dan Linhart and George Brooks started Crema, the founding question was not what service should we build? It was something closer to what kind of company would we actually want to work for? That they asked the second question first, before the pressures of growth had a chance to crowd out the harder ones, turns out to explain a great deal about how Crema has become what it is today.

The two co-founders have been friends since high school. George built the early company as a solopreneur, working as a designer at a time when good design was both rare and genuinely consequential. Not design in the decorative sense, but design understood as problem-solving: how people move through a product, how intuitive the journey from one point to another actually is, how the aesthetic and the functional work together or against each other. Dan brought the operational and strategic capacity George's creative work needed in order to grow. Together, they built what became Crema.

From the beginning, they were building toward a vision that was not purely commercial. Work, in their view, exists for a purpose larger than output. The people doing it should feel respected and valued, and so should the people they are serving. These are not empty phrases at Crema but the terms around which the company's culture was organized from the start, and the things that have stayed constant while almost everything else has changed.

Hold Tightly, Hold Loosely

The business world Crema operates in today looks almost nothing like the one it entered at founding. The old wisdom held that a well-executed business model had a lifespan of roughly a decade. That assumption has collapsed. In a market shaped by accelerating technology cycles and waves of disruption that arrive before the previous one has fully resolved, a model that lasts three years can feel like a durable achievement. The design and digital product industry has been especially volatile, and Crema has lived through enough of that volatility to develop something rare: a considered philosophy for navigating it without losing what matters most.

That philosophy begins with a question Dan and George have returned to many times over the years: what, exactly, are they refusing to change no matter what?

Dan's answer has sharpened over time. The list of things he holds tightly to, the true non-negotiables, has actually gotten shorter as the company has grown and the market has evolved. But the things that remain on that list he holds more tightly than he ever did before, carrying fewer commitments and greater conviction behind each of them.

The practical implication of this is significant. It means being willing to let go of the things that feel important but are actually just the current form of something more fundamental: the specific service they offer, how they run the business day to day, how the team is structured, and which tools they use. And it means protecting, with real discipline, the things underneath all of that: the values, the culture, the way people are treated, the commitment to doing work that genuinely serves others.

"The principles, the mission and values, those will never change," Dan says. "But past that, the way you express those values through the services you provide, you really do have to react to the needs of the market."

Crema has reorganized its operating model over the years, building around a core group of senior experts alongside a carefully curated bench of partners, an approach that keeps the company lean and flexible by design rather than circumstance.

For any founder or business leader navigating a market that keeps reshaping itself, the insight Dan and George have built Crema around is worth sitting with. The organizations that survive disruption are not necessarily the most adaptable. They are the most clear: clear about which commitments are truly foundational, and genuinely flexible about everything built on top of them. That distinction, held consciously and revisited often, is the difference between companies that drift through change and companies that endure it.

When AI Arrived

George was on to AI early, and what convinced both founders that the moment was genuinely significant was not the initial capability of the tools but the breathtaking speed at which they improved. Software evaluation timelines that had long stretched across months, with teams needing time to test, assess fit, and wait for products to mature, had changed to a matter of weeks. The tools were improving faster than any normal process for evaluating them could keep up with.

Crema takes the leading edge seriously, with the team regularly engaging at industry conferences alongside the practitioners shaping where design and technology are heading. What they are hearing out there has confirmed what they were already seeing internally: the market has moved past novelty. Dan returned recently from an industry gathering where the loudest refrain was no more AI point solutions. "People are getting a little tired of the fluff," he says. "Show me truly what is gonna help move the needle in my life, or my team's life, or my company's life."

For a consultancy whose work is fundamentally relational, AI has changed the depth of delivery without changing the nature of the work itself. The stakeholders on the other end of each engagement are still people, with evolving priorities and mid-project changes in direction that no automated system can anticipate. The question of why a client feels they need to make a particular decision is not something an AI can answer. It is a human-to-human conversation, and that remains the irreducible heart of what Crema does.

One Plus One Equals Three

Consider elite athletes and the tools available to them today: better equipment, richer performance data, more sophisticated training methods than any previous generation had access to. Nobody concludes from all of that technology that the athlete's skill, instinct, and judgment matter less. The tools free the athlete to operate at a higher level, because what technology handles frees up energy for what only the athlete can do.

Dan uses this analogy to describe how Crema thinks about AI. One plus one equals three: human capability and AI capability, properly combined, produce something neither could achieve alone. AI handles the processing and speed; humans supply the judgment and creativity. Together, they produce more than either could alone.

The distinction Dan draws between prediction and judgment matters. AI processes vastly more data than any human could and makes predictions based on it. Judgment is something different: the capacity to weigh experience, intuition, wisdom, and context in ways that numbers and data alone cannot capture. The numbers might point in one direction; the right decision might be another, because of something about this particular client, this particular moment, that no model can fully capture.

"Doing work with your hands and your mind is just something that's indispensable of what it means to be human," Dan says. "Work requires judgment, and wisdom, and sacrifice. It's not all the numbers."

Where AI can handle the parts of the work that do not require human judgment, the humans in the room can bring more of their energy and creativity to the parts that do. That redistribution is where Crema finds the most value, treating AI as the instrument that clears away the mechanical in order to make room for the irreplaceable.

The Truest Voice

In any industry, trust is the invisible infrastructure that makes a client willing to hand you a problem they cannot solve themselves. In a moment when AI enables every company to produce more output faster, the question of what actually builds and sustains that trust has become more consequential than ever.

At Crema, the answer has always been the same: your people are your most credible advertisement. Not your portfolio, not your awards, not your marketing. The employees who show up every day and either embody what you say you stand for, or don't.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 73% of people report their trust in a brand would increase if it authentically reflected its culture. That finding points at something Crema has understood from the beginning: how a company treats its people on any ordinary Tuesday is what eventually shapes how clients and prospective clients feel about the brand. There is no shortcut around it, because culture seeps out whether a company intends it to or not. You can control your messaging; you cannot control the reputation that forms through thousands of interactions over years. The way people describe their work when no one is watching, the small behaviors that add up over years: these things are harder to manufacture than any marketing campaign and more durable than any product announcement.

As AI enables every company to produce more, faster, what sets a company apart is shifting away from how much it can produce and toward something harder to automate: the character of the relationships inside it, and what those relationships reveal about who the company really is.

Culture, in the end, is the signal. Not the brand, not the portfolio, not the press release. It is the actual lived character of an organization, the way its people show up for each other and for the clients they serve. And in an environment where every competitor can now generate impressive-looking output on demand, the signal that actually travels is the one no algorithm can manufacture.

Why Work Matters

Crema was built on the conviction that the quality of working relationships is not soft or secondary. It is the infrastructure on which everything else rests. The good days at work are better when you genuinely enjoy the people alongside you. The hard days, and work is called labor for a reason, become survivable because of those same relationships. That interplay is what gives a workplace its character, and character is what draws the right clients, the right talent, and the right opportunities over time.

This is why the original founding question, what kind of company would we actually want to work for, has proven more durable than any particular service Crema has offered. The services have evolved, the way the company runs has changed, the tools have transformed completely. The commitment to building something worth belonging to has not.

Culture is the signal Dan and George have been sending since the beginning, with every hire, every decision, and every client relationship they have chosen to build. It is not the easiest thing to sustain through the pressures of growth and change. But it is the thing that lasts. And it is, ultimately, what clients are choosing when they choose to work with Crema.

Dan Linhart and George Brooks are the co-founders of Crema, a digital product design and development consultancy. This conversation is part of the Humans & AI: Founder Series by HumanCulture.

Sources

Edelman. (2025). 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer. Edelman. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer

Edelman. (2025). 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand trust. Edelman. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer/special-report-brands