> The CEO states their main differentiator is their culture so I wonder what the actual landscape looks like

That's an alarm bell if I ever heard of it in an industry famous for losing money.

"We can't really tell you why we'll make money and nobody else will, other than that our culture is better!"

Is it? Obviously the hard numbers take precedence but I wouldn't necessarily hang up the phone.

There was a talk at [Guess the programming language]-conf last year, where a director at a pretty big investment fund was talking about how their choice to use said language (as opposed to being another C++/Python shop) has very much effected their approach to finding solutions to problems for the better.

It's probably impossible to measure, but the confidence to do things differently company-wide could set you in good stead asymptotically. Even if culture just means not being Uber e.g. no "a very, very strange year at [CompanyName]" blog posts or similar.

That doesn't in any way explain how culture leads to profits. The strongest argument you're making is "better culture means better performance" but that's incredibly hand-wavy in this context, and performance isn't even tied to profits in any way in your example.

It might be why you'd want to work there, but it's not a reason to invest there.

Was it Ocaml and Jane street?