Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

hunterwalk.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 326 posts

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#91

Post by onion2k »

nojvek wrote: post #77

When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like. The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microso…

Equity is what builds wealth.

In exceptional circumstances, yes. In most circumstances equity in a startup ends up being worthless, even in the event of exit. Starting your own startup, or joining a startup as a very early employee can make you rich; anything else and you might as well be buying lottery tickets.

That's not to denigrate startups in any way. Working in a startup is amazing. It's just not how you get rich as an employee unless you are staggeringly lucky.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#92

Post by shp0ngle »

Qwertious wrote: post #73
namdnay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah I think we've stumbled on something here.. Spotify seem to be the source/example of all these new management fads. I remember having to sit through that hand-drawn sketch video (is there a name for these things?) describing how Spotify does SAFe (if you don't know what this is, pretend you never read it and continue your life as usual, please) and how awesome it is and why we all need to do it.

What sort of thing is SAFe? Is it some sort of unsuccessful corporate pantomime of a successful practice?

it’s “scaled agile framework”.

Move on.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#93

Post by netfortius »

It depends, i.e. I would not be so definitive on the "no such thing" part, for sure. I witnessed (and enjoyed) such a startup experience, myself, a few years back, when Arity came into existence, from "under and within" Allstate. Spending even one single day working in Northbrook (Allstate HQ), and another one @ the Mart, in Chicago (Arity office), and you could immediately tell the two worlds apart.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#94

Post by gwbas1c »

IMO, the bigger issue is that many people don't know what a startup is. Yet, as a culture we glorify a "startup." Everyone wants to work for one, even though they don't really know the clear line between a startup and an exit.

I remember seeing billboards in Silicon Valley. They were from AOL, trying to recruit. They said, "You're the startup, we're the VC." At the time, AOL had no defining characteristic that made it appear like a startup, even for people who don't fully understand what a startup is.

Another time, I was in a post-acquisition "startup." I recognized the situation and focused on the area with clear product-market fit. The "CEO" tried to continue to find new product-market fits and blew through our R&D budget. (The R&D budget was supposed to improve the existing product, not find new ones.) When the situation came to a head, only people who worked on the clear product-market fit area remained. (Everyone who behaved like we were a "startup" was let go.)

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#96

Post by spaetzleesser »

virgilp wrote: post #29
sixhobbits wrote: post #5

I 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 'br…

While I worked for Adobe, one of the executives there (Mark Randall, serial entrepreneur that was "acquired" by the company, awesome guy) launched the "Red box" initiative that eventually become https://www.kickbox.org/ . The red box was essentially a "toolbox" that he created on how to build a startup (set of training materials + $1000USD credit card that you could use however you wish), and the purpose was to get e…

“except that I knew that I didn't get to keep any upside. L

Same at my company. They have similar programs but you also don’t get any stake in the outcome and are still controlled by executives who in the end get the credit.

Same for hackathons they tried to organize. The idea quickly turned from fun projects basically into overtime to check off Jura tickets quickly but with the addition of free pizza.

I think leadership in big companies is almost by definition very controlling. They simply can’t let go. It’s against the instincts that got them into their positions.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#97

Post by ignoramous »

With all due respect to the author, I think the article kind of romanticizes start-up founders and their perils.

Amazon famously dubs itself with being the biggest startup in the world. There's a company that espouses Clay Christensen's philosophy of building enduring businesses. Over the years, a lot has been said and written about how Amazon manages to do it, I mean, this is better demonstrated by Jeff, its founder, whose wealth went from $10B in 1997 to $1B in 2002/3, but still bet big on AWS (2003), Prime (2005), and Kindle (2007) in an unprecedented run of series of innovations that'd could have killed the company.

--

"working backwards"

I want to draw some parallels to the YC application process with how Amazon operates, from what I've read and what I've experienced as an ex-employee:

A lot of product development is funded at Amazon after review of what's called a PR/FAQ doc [0] (this is the "working backwards from the customer" part). The PR needs to clearly articulate in a headline or two what the product is about; whilst the first paragraph must present a complete summary of what the product would be in its v1 form at launch. The next few paragraphs detail the current problem and the proposed solution interlaced by imaginary quotes from would-be customers; and the concluding paragraph has a clear call-to-action on exactly how customers can make use of the proposed solution.

If you've ever filled out a YC form, you'd find yourself going through a similar exercise.

And on what merits is a product funded [1]?

- If it works, would it be really big?

- Is the customer / target market well-served today?

- What in Amazon's approach is the key differentiator? And is that compelling enough?

- Should / can Amazon build it in-house, or do they need to buy some / all of the expertise?

Again, pretty similar to the process YC has [2].

--

"two-pizza teams" [3]

The team that's put together to run is encouraged to own the product end-to-end ("single-threaded owners" aka STOs), in the truest sense of the word: That is they're free to duplicate effort, not be beholden to another team's priorities, build whatever they need to, buy whatever they need to, and so on... Other STOs running existing but overlapping business or businesses at the risk of being cannibalized by this newer one do not absolutely get any say. This approach to incubating newer products within Amazon is what led them to build AWS in the first place, because they didn't want various internal engineering teams to be truly duplicating their efforts in building "undifferentiated parts of their businesses" which, on the Internet, is building all that Infrastructure required to start small and yet be able to scale. AWS, interestingly, itself was removed / isolated from Amazon's Infrastructure team at the time and was completely a separate under-taking (there's probably a Harvard case-study in there somewhere demonstrating the effectiveness of STOs).

--

"disrupt yourself"

The other thing Amazon does is it is truly customer-focused as opposed to product-focused or competitor-focused. If I were to take the example of Android: How many customers do Google have a direct line to? If you are a FireOS user, you could chat with customer service about its annoyances, send an email to kindle-feedback@ or even escalate it to jeff@ and all those complaints are root-caused and fixed to whatever extent deemed necessary, with FireOS MayDay being an extreme example of this customer-obsession. Amazon believes in listening to its customers and disrupting its own cash-cows if it means it delivers value to the customer. No one flinches a bit in taking these decisions.

--

"you can't fight gravity" [4]

As opposed to reacting technology changes constantly and riding the wave, Bezos instead believed in focusing on universal constants (like gravity) that never change: For example, for Amazon's e-commerce business, those constants are customers would always want lower prices, larger selection, and faster deliveries". That was never going to change. But this simple framework then lets his management team decide on what bets to take with respect to technologies that help move the needle in the right direction, because if they don't, someone else will eat their lunch by doing those three things.

--

"the best way to predict the future is to invent it"

To truly create an atmosphere of invention within Amazon, there are a lot of processes in-place, to make sure bureaucracy ("a single no" vs "a lot of yes") doesn't kill a promising idea. Of course, there's nuisance here, in that some decisions need to be carefully vetted ("one-way doors") vs ones that needn't be ("two-way doors") and the key is knowing which is which (and escalate when in doubt).

--

"simplify"

If you follow AWS, you'd know how primitive and lacking the v1s really are: For instance, Lambda launched with just NodeJS support with no observability story of note, no "local development" environment, no support for other runtimes, and just 1 minute of execution time. This stems from the PR/FAQ process (distill down the v1 to the absolute minimum but deliver comprehensive value to the under-served) and two-pizza teams (too many resources to work on a problem is never approved of, so it is paramount to do things that don't scale for the v1).

--

This isn't to say Amazon hasn't been disrupted at all: It has been, by instacart, daipers.com, doordash among some examples that come to mind.

I am no expert (either in the ways of the likes of Amazon or the nimble start-ups), but I believe that to reduce innovation / invention being a playground for start-ups just because they've no access to a "fancy cafeteria" is telling half the story [5] and probably misinterpreting symptoms for cause.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdpBqmDpzM

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/forum-for-growth-and-innovation/podcasts...

[2] YC also fund all sorts of "uninteresting" ideas too (from outside, what looks like a spread and pray, but is likely a heuristic that they are working off of from).

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XavPl5t9dS8

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4MtQGRIIuA

[5] I mean, at the end of the day, Waymo wasn't even a startup by the time Google acquired it and also it isn't like Google doesn't have a track record of successful acquisitions...

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#98

Post by throwaway744678 »

RHSeeger wrote: post #80
nmfisher wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that an incentive structure is probably needed as a matter of practice (since few people will want to do extra work with zero upside), but I wouldn't call it exploitative. You're an employee, you work for a guaranteed salary now in return for someone else shouldering the risk. That's the nature of the deal. If you want to share in the upside, you have to share the risk. It's not like anyone's being forced to…

But the company isn't shouldering all the cost/risk. > I realized that to get it to actually ship I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. If you have to work nights and weekends, but get none of the benefits for it, you might as well work nights and weekends on your _own_ side project.

The (implied) benefits you get is that you can work on interesting things, and probably get much more freedom in your day job. Looks very fine to me if done on a voluntary basis.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#99

Post by ashtonkem »

onion2k wrote: post #91
nojvek wrote: post #77

When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like. The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microso…

Equity is what builds wealth. In exceptional circumstances, yes. In most circumstances equity in a startup ends up being worthless, even in the event of exit. Starting your own startup, or joining a startup as a very early employee can make you rich; anything else and you might as well be buying lottery tickets. That's not to denigrate startups in any way . Working in a startup is amazing. It's just not how you get r…

Even when they’re not worthless, most startup options end up being worth less than the salary that one could’ve gotten at a non-startup. Last time I looked into it, and it was a while ago, the median startup option package was exercised for a profit of $30k, not nothing but far less than what one could’ve gotten at a large company like ... Microsoft.

Arguably the existence of several different types of stock options has broken the startup option system, incentivizing founders to play financial games with dilution and debt, and separating their incentive structure from that of their workers. Instead they now get paid with the VCs, which is bad for the workers.

Nothing is worth working like a dog though. That’s always a bad trade.

Re: There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

#100

Post by thinkmassive »

aloer wrote: post #40
virgilp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I worked for Adobe, one of the executives there (Mark Randall, serial entrepreneur that was "acquired" by the company, awesome guy) launched the "Red box" initiative that eventually become https://www.kickbox.org/ . The red box was essentially a "toolbox" that he created on how to build a startup (set of training materials + $1000USD credit card that you could use however you wish), and the purpose was to get e…

Is the expectation with the kickbox that you work on your idea in your own time or was there a process to work on it during work hours as well?

In the link[1] virgilp shared it says red box participants get 1000 CHF budget, 20% of working time, and access to experts.

So they want you to prove out your idea with an allocation of one workday per week. I’d bet most people have to add their own nights and weekends to make it successful.

1: https://home.getkickbox.com/

Post reply on HN