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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”

#101

Post by JumpCrisscross »

RHSeeger wrote: post #84
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the company isn't shouldering all the cost/risk It’s paying your salary. Not having a salary, or having a lower and/or unreliable one, is part of the risk of a start-up. > you might as well work nights and weekends on your _own_ side project Nights and weekends plus working days. Not just nights and weekends. Start-up means all in. Hobby means just nights and week-ends.

We're talking past each other here, so I'll try to simplify where I'm coming from... It is exploitative by the company to expect you to work nights and weekends, but then all the possible benefits go to the company. If you're going to do work on your nights and weekends, then do work for yourself, not for a company that won't compensate you for it. The above has nothing to do with whether or not it's like a startup;…

> It is exploitative by the company to expect you to work nights and weekends, but then all the possible benefits go to the company

We’re disagreeing, not talking past each other. (Which is fine!)

Above-market salaries, bonuses and the promise of promotion (within the company or without) are fair compensation for aggressive work expectations. The upside is sharply capped in comparison with start-ups. But the downside has been practically eliminated. Nobody bemoans investment bankers, who have largely this compensation model.

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

#102

Post by wwww4all »

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…

Most engineers at startups get very little equity and most end up worthless due to dilution or failure.

Even if engineers hit the startup lottery, the payout for most are not that much. Very few end with multi million dollar payouts.

Statistically, financials are better with big company offers for most engineers.

Some engineers that get in early with a unicorn can hit the jackpot. This is mostly combination of timing and luck and network. Some just happened to be in the right place at the right time with right group of people. PayPal engineers, early Google engineers.

Early Apple engineers were not so lucky.

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

#103

Post by DebtDeflation »

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…

>The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock.

I joined a startup in 1999. There were 3 founders and I was employee #2 after that. I received a ton of options (this was before RSUs became popular). We had a great product and a great team, but 18 months later ran out of money and unfortunately it was right after the dotcom implosion of early 2001 when funding had completely dried up.

My takeaway was that base salary is actually the most important component of TC. Cash bonus based on some metric that you control comes second. Equity comes third. If you work for a FAANG, maybe equity can move higher up (though it remains to be seen how long this will be true).

Outside of FAANG (and top executives at F500 sized public companies) very few people are getting rich off of the "equity" component of their TC. The vast majority of startups go bust before IPO or acquisition.

Time is the most valuable commodity you have, don't squander it for lottery tickets and empty promises.

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

#104

Post by jonfw »

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…

I worked within IBM garage, it's not 'any team of people', it's a specific organization that mostly does services work. Their 'secret sauce' is that they're trying to consult on technology and company culture at the same time, in line with Conway's lay.

I.E. If you want to be more agile you'll want to adopt CI/CD, if you want micro services you'll want smaller more autonomous dev teams.

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

#105

Post by ignoramous »

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.

Comes with a lot of caveats, though [0]. Amazon and likely Microsoft, has made many people wealthy, too. The surge in BigTech stock prices over the years has been nothing short of extraordinary, and there's no indication of that slowing down as more enterprises move to the cloud and even more consumers take to the Internet.

Also, overworking like a start-up employee isn't necessarily what a start-up is about: A start-up's value is in its under-the-radar disruptive potential (that is, being dismissed by the incumbents as a mere "toy"). That said, a start-up must capture as much value it can (this is where working hard, being highly flexible, and moving fast likely matters) from the market it helps create, lest it be subject to irrelevance; but this part comes a bit later in a start-up's life, at which point (the start-up is no longer under-the-radar and investors are circling around it like bees) its stock-options wouldn't likely make an engineer "generational wealth" either (different story for executives) but would have to work hard anyway.

Read also: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

[0] https://mashable.com/tech/2854/how-amazons-97-million-eero-a...

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

#106

Post by virgilp »

thinkmassive wrote: post #100
aloer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Do note that they appear to have fine-tuned the program. I was one of the early participants - initially the blue box was a "secret" because Mark Randall genuinely didn't know what to put in it. In the meanwhile, the blue box was refined and it appears that a gold box turned up. True to his form, he approached the entire process as an MVP that was evolved & enhanced in time.

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

#107

Post by jonfw »

2sk21 wrote: post #54
theta_d wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, it was the same in the Watson group where I worked about 6 years ago. It was pure cargo cult activity that ultimately resulted in much lower productivity.

I actually liked my experience with the guild structure, as somebody new to the industry. I had my specialty, was the leader in my team in my particular specialty, but that's mostly because I was the only one in my team with the specialty. The guild structure got me the opportunity to network with people who were more experienced in that area

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

#108

Post by rmac »

this topic has been beaten to death (read these)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dil... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor...

you have to ask yourself: why would the most talented and/or visionary and/or defiant individuals want to stay at a large company to build new products? Be it in Labs, Spin-outs, Spin-ins, corporate accelerators, skunkworks projects, or what have you. The craziest of the crazy will go out on their own and try to build something. Most will fail. Those that persist eventually combine luck+opportunity and turn their hallucinations into mainstream-disruptive innovations.

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

#109

Post by teleforce »

bitwize wrote: post #68
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…

The word for this is "skunkworks". Even the most independent skunkworks still serves big-company goals, often taking advantage of big-company resources and generating IP for the big company. In some ways, a skunkworks is startup-like but in many critical ways it's way different.

Just came here to say this. The popular examples were the legendary work at Lockheed Martin, and also at Bell Lab for Unix. I was under the impression that Unix was well supported in the beginning at Bell Lab. Apparently according Ken it's not so and initially they need to piggyback on a grant that did not even mentioned OS or system research due the outstanding issues with the Multics project.

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

#110

Post by ma2rten »

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…

You can have payouts proportional to success even in big companies. Google famously payed $120M to Anthony Levandowski. This is because there was an agreement in place to pay projects in X based on the value that they create.
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