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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”

#11

Post by rovek »

kludgekraft wrote: post #2

What 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?

I don't know if there is a "main reason" for all instances. For me, on this kind of project at one of the Biggest Co's, it seemed a bit like the safety net point you make and it creeps into everything. There didn't seem to be much pressure because the project was never going to be pulled and had infinite money. This seemed to manifest in "good people" (my opinion) working at about 40% capacity and new hires having a background in companies more like BigCo than InternalStartup.

Edit: To clarify my last point, my assumption being that the point of InternalStartup was to allow deviating almost entirely from BigCo's approach to everything and that those people from OtherBigCo would be less likely to have that mindset.

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

#12

Post by jiofih »

cdavid wrote: post #8
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #3

There 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.

Strongly recommend reading the book - they had tons of accountability as critical projects were handed to them on tight deadlines. Yes, working on cool stuff, but delivering at an extremely high level.

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

#13

Post by cs02rm0 »

It's just big company talk to pretend they're cool and innovative. Obviously ridiculous garbage that probably got someone a good annual review score.

A small company I was working with had heard that IBM, who had a customer in common, were operating some sort of "garage" thing that the customer really liked. Rumours were flying around, someone had heard it was a video conferencing app, they were desperate to know more about this secret sauce.

Eventually I got to speak to an opposite number from them on a piece of work that joined with our own. They were calling any team of people a garage (because of the Amazon, Apple, etc stories). That's all it was, just a different word for team, like toddlers playing let's pretend.

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

#15

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

cdavid wrote: post #8
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #3

There 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.

>We engineers love skunkworks: working on cool stuff, without accountability and a lot of freedom

I'm pretty sure people who keep saying this have no idea what working at Skunkwork was actually like.

If you read Ben Rich's book, which I recommend you do, you'll find out that they had tons of accountability, the more classified their projects were, the more they were drowning in paperwork. No employee was to be left alone with the blueprints and if one of two needed to go to the bathroom then the plans had to be locked in a safe during that time.

Also, the hours of work and the stress they were under was insane as shit would break unexpectedly all the time.

I'm sure this is not what engineers love, and what they tink they mean by Skunworks is cowboy coding and being paid handsomely to play like kindergarten kids in the sandbox with the latest shiny toys, while leaving work at 5 PM.

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

#16

Post by k__ »

The main problem I see is ownership.

If you don't really own your company, you won't ever behave as if you owned it.

It's basically a less rigid version of a big corp job, not more, not less. Which isn't bad, big corps have to rejuvenate themselves in some way, but selling it people as a "win-win" because they get to work in a big corp AND do a startup is a simply a lie.

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

#19

Post by theta_d »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #13

It's just big company talk to pretend they're cool and innovative. Obviously ridiculous garbage that probably got someone a good annual review score. A small company I was working with had heard that IBM, who had a customer in common, were operating some sort of "garage" thing that the customer really liked. Rumours were flying around, someone had heard it was a video conferencing app, they were desperate to know mor…

When I worked at IBM Cloud they copied the Spotify model of squads and tribes and guilds. I remember having to watch a video about it on my first day.

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

#20

Post by 5600k »

> Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns.

This doesn’t work all that well in my experience.

Employees focus in the stock which is not in line with the success of the product.

ESPPs aren’t bad. They’re seen as a bonus by most employees and some get excited watching the stock climb. Some may try to use that as a motivator.

But it’s more like watching your favorite team on TV that you’ve bet on with no control. That doesn’t inspire the right behavior.

Vesting stock based on some product metric would still be hindered by the futility of attempting to tie stock price to the actual success of the product.

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