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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”

#201

Post by caturopath »

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…

I was really shocked to see into a couple 'startup in a big company' teams at my company and to realize just how little they actually went off-leash. I don't know the details -- how much of it is not being allowed, how much of it is people who've worked here 10 years believing we're doing things the right way -- but I was really taken aback by the number of things they had to slow them down and the amount of oversight that seemed to be in place, given the general concept.

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

#202

Post by solidasparagus »

ashtonkem wrote: post #147
scruple wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most startup options end up being worth less than the salary that one could’ve gotten at a non-startup I took a lower salary to work at a startup I "believed" in. We were eventually acquired and my options were in the low six-figures when exercised. I worked there for 6 years. If I average the options profit and add it to my base salary, I'd have still been underpaid in the local area for my skills and experience l…

> I never worked like a dog for the place in my story, at least. It had a very sane work/life balance. For sure not every single startup overworks it’s employees, and not every overworked employee works at a startup. But there is a very common (but not universal!) trend for startup employees to be encouraged to overwork themselves so that their options will be worth more in the long run. Your mileage may vary, as you…

Startups tend to have poor engineering management (due to lack of time and experience) and that can easily lead to overworking employees.

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

#203

Post by g9yuayon »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #103
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…

Startup is not a lottery. Working for startup is risky, but the key is to build a system that increases your accumulated probability of success -- this is exactly why it's important to live in the bay area and work for some startups there, at least before the Covid-19. You get to see a large number of people who didn't fund any company, but still became financially independent or built an explosive career by choosing to join the right companies at the right time. You get to see how those people make their choices. You get to see how those people decide to jump ship. You get to build a social circle where you learn lots of first-hand information about startups.

Yes, it's still risky to join a startup, but no it's not a lottery. The chance of being rewarded handsomely is orders of magnitude higher than buying lottery.

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

#204

Post by caturopath »

Fede_V wrote: post #163

If you are a great engineer that can get a job at FAAG, joining a start up is almost never worth it from a strictly financial point of view. 17 years ago, Paul Graham was able to post this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html - nowadays, the compensation in tech has shifted upwards so much ( https://www.levels.fyi/ ) - that start ups are just not competitive when you adjust for a risk premium. Finance capture…

Big tech salaries are at this point high enough that even with some acquisitions, I see folks getting payoffs that didn't catch them up to where they'd be financially if they went the big tech route.

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

#205

Post by sgt101 »

Aeolun wrote: post #36
sgt101 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm also pretty sure most engineers don't want this, and what hey actually want is cowboy coding, playing like kindergarten kids in the sandbox with the latest shiny toys, while leaving work at 5 PM. Nope. They want autonomy, mastery and purpose. They want to be able to apply what they know appropriately - not to be micromanaged or frustrated by instructions that make no sense. They want to be able to develop skills…

Except for that last point, I agree. Maybe if it’s a tiny bonfire.

I didn't say that it was alight...

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

#206

Post by xapata »

harikb wrote: post #164
DebtDeflation wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 thing most people forget about options & RSU is that one is taking away a big chunk of the TC and delay it to a future year. Even when you hate your job, you will be hesitant to leave the company because of FOMO and sunk cost fallacy That said, anecdotally, every one of my close circle of friends made decent amount money from equity (one of the many companies they worked at did very well) - far higher than the 10…

> my close circle of friends

That's extreme selection bias. One of the major ways startups recruit is via friends.

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

#207

Post by lamontcg »

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 creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. That team was very, very far removed from Amazon proper and actually delivered.

That's probably the only time I've seen that kind of startup-with-a-large-corporation work. I can think of other examples (like Amazon's google-competing search engine) which tried to copy that and failed pretty completely.

I suspect other successful things that happened after I was there were run as "startups" though (I'd guess Alexa?).

But in general every other time I've seen those happen at other companies they've been completely miserable failures.

Working in IT, usually those "startups" are full of Dunning Krugers who mostly go to war against the corporate IT and don't actually have very good business ideas (and honestly the corporate IT has been run like crap and deserved it, but that doesn't actually help launch your product). They're usually fed a bunch of ego-food about how they're the special children which will entirely transform the next generation of the company, and then they wind up fighting with everyone else.

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

#208

Post by vmception »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #96
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…

“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 leader…

Pretty much all company hackathons are just tech debt day

At startups and big companies

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

#209

Post by wpietri »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #103
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…

As somebody who also has a bunch of lottery tickets that didn't pay off, I feel your pain. But I think there's a bit of hindsight bias to your conclusion. I think it's entirely reasonable for people to trade salary for equity. I also think it's reasonable to stick with cash. As long as people are making well-informed choices, I'm entirely fine with gambling on a positive-sum effort.

That said, there are good questions about how much things have changed vs 25 years ago, how likely an early employee is to see a big payout on exit, and how much the fever for VC-backed startups distorts employee choices. But that's another rant.)

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

#210

Post by johannes1234321 »

watwut wrote: post #200
johannes1234321 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with the cafeteria is that it reflects company culture. If you in the office sit at a desk in the Google search engine area or youtube or Waymo is hardly noticable. People have settled in an if the neighboring teams go home at "normal" times, the "startup" team will go home at those times. Also you have a hard time to keep the small team culture when directly embedded. And then corporates encourage changing…

So like, the whole startup thing boils down to being at work late and working overtime, despite all the studies on crunch showing it is inefficient and less productive?

I think that summary is too narrow (i.e. the whole team, maybe even as "us vs. them" thing etc. are part of culture) but yes, for many of those startup guys "do 'hard' work, push things" seems to be an important piece and that's a reason for me to keep my distance.
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