There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
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There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
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Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#2What is the main reason though? The BigCo being too risk averse? Or employees having too much of a safety net? Or BigCo processes weighing the team down? A combination of these?
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#3There is, the concept is known as a skunkworks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunkworks_project
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#4Got hit with a medium login wall.
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#5I mean, sure, but it also misses the point a bit. "Startup in a big company" doesn't mean "yo take some cashdollar and try build and release something to the public", but it does mean "hey, take a small team and do your own thing with less oversight and process overhead from higher-ups".
The team I worked in at AWS was like this and it felt a lot like startup teams I've worked with. That didn't mean we could take 'brand and legal risk', and if that's what you want then definitely go and start your own thing.
If you want more autonomy and higher velocity than is normal at corporates, then a 'startup within a big company' might actually work out for you.
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#6A lot of affirmations that it is not possible, with examples of where it didn't happen, but doesn't really go into "why" at all. The closest they get was near the end by alluding to risk-aversion and having to wear Google badges to the cafeteria.
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#7I worked for a startup within another company. It got spun out and the CEO used it as his own escape hatch, while selling off the remaining parts of the original company. The startup had a successful exit, although it didn't become a unicorn.
Any time someone makes a categorical statement like these, you know it's not wholly true. There are more permutations to the real world than anyone can think of up front.
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#8There is, the concept is known as a skunkworks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunkworks_project
What's interesting about skunkworks is much it gets invoked by people vs how much it actually happens in practice.
We engineers love skunkworks: working on cool stuff, without accountability and a lot of freedom ? Who would not want that ! But there are very few situations where this is sustainable, for reasons well explained by OP.
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#9I'm not sure why everyone seems so focused on the cafeteria thing. I'm not sure people and their attitudes towards amenities are really the problem here.
From my understanding, the differerence is the companywide attitude to risk. A startup has a "grow at any cost, or maybe perish" attitude. If things go south, bankruptcy will take care of the leftover excess risk (barring criminal charges). A bigco cannot easily go bankrupt, even less a single department. There are tons and tons of capital to eat through if the accumulated risk is realized in cost. So a bigco has to do something about that risk somehow, because most of the company wants to keep what capital it has, only a small part of it really wants to risk things. So the only means to have a situation where you don't risk bigco for a single department is not making it a department. Make it a Ltd. in a holding or something.
Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
#10There is, the concept is known as a skunkworks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunkworks_project
The most famous version of this (where the name came from), was Lockheed’s. A family member’s father worked there, and had a lot to do with some rather exotic avionics.