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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”

#41

Post by acomjean »

Wait. In a lot of these startup companies the business plan seems to be grow the customer base and worry about profit later.(youtube, Instagram, waze) Selling to a big company with a lot of capital seems to be the goal or a survival technique.

Johnson and Johnson I’m told handles the aquiring of businesses well (it’s a business conglomeration of hundreds of entities). I know someone who left after their division was sold from JnJ and everything started going south.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_%26_Johnson

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

#42

Post by mathattack »

corty wrote: post #9

I'm not sure why everyone seems so focused on the cafeteria thing. I'm not sure people and their attitudes towards amenities are really the problem here. From my understanding, the differerence is the companywide attitude to risk. A startup has a "grow at any cost, or maybe perish" attitude. If things go south, bankruptcy will take care of the leftover excess risk (barring criminal charges). A bigco cannot easily go…

It’s a combination of risk and forced standardization.

Big companies try to standardize to allow C players to perform as Bs. This crushes As.

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

#43

Post by lonesword »

theta_d wrote: post #19
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.

When I worked at a startup we copied the Spotify model as well. We called it "functional teams" and so on but the idea was the same - we watched the spotify videos as well. To be honest it helped. I think this is a point in IBM's favor because they saw something better, and adopted it even though "it was not invented here".

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

#45

Post by jiriknesl »

There are lots of startups within big companies. Example is Zonky (peer to peer lending startup) within Home Credit - multibillion dollar lending entreprise. But they have been created with a strong team which felt ownership. And as Home Credit was growing like crazy themselves too, they left this internal startup to self-manage too.

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

#46

Post by varjag »

pembrook wrote: post #34
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…

Sounds like in your case it worked out, but I would consider AWS to be an insane outlier...also from a company still founder-led (Bezos is an exec with proven startup success--hence why Amazon exists in the first place!). I think the point of the author is that, inside a big company, the fundamental risk/reward incentives that drive startup innovation are removed. Autonomy alone doesn't drive people to make crazy dec…

That's the environment startups exist in due to economic realities of having little money to go on rather than some grand strategy.

There is a possibility a better balance of risk/reward (say 5% of ownership and 150k salary) could well produce just as good or better outcomes.

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

#48

Post by franciscop »

captainmuon wrote: post #22
corty wrote: post #9

I'm not sure why everyone seems so focused on the cafeteria thing. I'm not sure people and their attitudes towards amenities are really the problem here. From my understanding, the differerence is the companywide attitude to risk. A startup has a "grow at any cost, or maybe perish" attitude. If things go south, bankruptcy will take care of the leftover excess risk (barring criminal charges). A bigco cannot easily go…

If people really think of founding enterprises as a gamble with potential infinite reward, but limited downside (as bankrupcy will take care of it), I would say our economy has a problem...

Why? Limited downside does not mean small, it just means limited. It can perfectly destroy a person's finances if they invest all their lifesavings in it. And the reward for a company is normally a % of how much value they provide to their customers (yes, I know, not always, but generally that's true). Unbounded does not mean infinite.

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

#50

Post by johannes1234321 »

corty wrote: post #9

I'm not sure why everyone seems so focused on the cafeteria thing. I'm not sure people and their attitudes towards amenities are really the problem here. From my understanding, the differerence is the companywide attitude to risk. A startup has a "grow at any cost, or maybe perish" attitude. If things go south, bankruptcy will take care of the leftover excess risk (barring criminal charges). A bigco cannot easily go…

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 jobs internal over leaving and hiring somebody else, which means that there are ties on all levels. Pulling out and having your own startup culture is hard. The cafeteria symbolizes that, as it is a social place and culture to large parts is a social thing.
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