I'll take the opposite tack. If you're just starting out or hiring your core team, having people who empathize with your vision is much more valuable.
This is the stage where if you're following "lean" principles, you're listening to customers. Strictly from a cost perspective, having customers in the house (as part of your team) is cheaper and you can iterate faster.
Constituting your team this way will lead to a much bigger interest in dogfooding your app once you've built a prototype. And your team will deeply and personally care about the product it is building.
But what I'll point out is that your culture will grow organically based on your team - you can't impose a culture, even if it's something as benign as "family first" - in a company of your size, anything imposed is a (forced) process and not a culture.
This is the stage where if you're following "lean" principles, you're listening to customers. Strictly from a cost perspective, having customers in the house (as part of your team) is cheaper and you can iterate faster.
Constituting your team this way will lead to a much bigger interest in dogfooding your app once you've built a prototype. And your team will deeply and personally care about the product it is building.
But what I'll point out is that your culture will grow organically based on your team - you can't impose a culture, even if it's something as benign as "family first" - in a company of your size, anything imposed is a (forced) process and not a culture.