Startup vs. Corporate Life

I have no regrets. My goal is for our employees to have the kind of environment we always wished the large companies we used to work for would have. In fact, many of my early employees were "corporate rescues", bright engineers that had been languishing in comfortable corners of large bureaucratic BigCo's that we convinced to join us, mainly on the promise of actually being able to use Python as part of their day job and work on meaningful/interesting problems.

At our "startup", we use the best tool for the job; we only work with bright people; we focus on results; we never stagnate; and, we deliver on an important mission. Also, our engineers get to open source a lot of work that isn't core to the business (see e.g. http://parse.ly/code).

The only BigCo's that I've seen that have tried to maintain that engineering-friendly environment are e.g. Google and Facebook, but for those companies, size still becomes a limiting factor on impact. As the essay put it, "Proportionally, you will have a bigger impact on the company's future than you will working for a corporation."

Product development also has a different feel when you're trying to create one of the world's next great software companies, rather than when you just happen to work at one that already holds that title.

> "Finally what do you really care about: name brand or doing cool work?"

I did a lot of boring, mundane work during my time at some startups as well as interesting work at others. It's either subjective or not informed by enough experience to say that only startup work is cool work and you can't find cool work at a larger company.

It really depends on what kind of impact one is looking for. The author touched on this point but think he could have made it clearer that working at a startup gives you the possibility of having a significant impact on a product with limited reach while working at a larger company gives the possibility of having a smaller impact on a product with much greater reach.

This is not always the case of course, you could work at a startup that creates an extremely popular product (though it may not be considered a "startup" for very long then) or work for a corporation on a project that will never see the light of day.

That's really a false dichotomy to suggest you can't do "cool work" at a large ("name brand") corporation. Some of the coolest work in technology has been done at extremely large companies (e.g. Google, Apple, IBM, Facebook).