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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”

#81

Post by tony0x02 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #50
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…

I forgot where I read it but I think statistics show that innovation at BigCo has only succeeded when the team is located at a separate location.

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

#82

Post by JumpCrisscross »

RHSeeger wrote: post #80
nmfisher wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that an incentive structure is probably needed as a matter of practice (since few people will want to do extra work with zero upside), but I wouldn't call it exploitative. You're an employee, you work for a guaranteed salary now in return for someone else shouldering the risk. That's the nature of the deal. If you want to share in the upside, you have to share the risk. It's not like anyone's being forced to…

But the company isn't shouldering all the cost/risk. > I realized that to get it to actually ship I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. If you have to work nights and weekends, but get none of the benefits for it, you might as well work nights and weekends on your _own_ side project.

> 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.

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

#83

Post by somberi »

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…

I would like to offer an extended view from the wealth accumulation angle. True, equity builds wealth, but in a startup, since there is no floor protection, when the startup becomes worthless (can happen for any number of reasons, and often do), then one wishes one had taken a salary (and reinvested in stocks or as seed investment - ways to gain equity exposure).

One could argue that PowerBI, in this example, gained any traction at all because it benefited from the large customer base and marketing muscle of Microsoft.

To extend further on the point Nojvek makes about how PowerBI moved very little of the topline revenues of the company; this also means that the bonus accrued to the author was because _some other team moved the needle_. This grouping of risk for a mean payoff, could be a desirable outcome as well, if one has better avenues to invest the capital. It all comes down to how one views risk, its mitigation, and wealth accumulation horizon.

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

#84

Post by RHSeeger »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82
RHSeeger wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the company isn't shouldering all the cost/risk. > I realized that to get it to actually ship I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. If you have to work nights and weekends, but get none of the benefits for it, you might as well work nights and weekends on your _own_ side project.

> 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's speaking only to the deal in question being exploitative.

(Side note: I don't have a problem working some nights and the occasional weekend for my job. But it's very rarely expected of me; it tends to happen when I make a commitment to delivering something in a certain timeframe and then it turns out my guess as to how long it would take was wrong. Because I'm flexible, so is my company; if I need to take a half day to help my daughter with something, nobody is going to push back on that. I just wanted to make it clear that I don't consider the occasional night/weekend exploitative automatically... just that the situation described by the OP appeared to be so.)

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

#85

Post by sonofaragorn »

taneq wrote: post #61
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…

> I didn't get to keep any upside. I had most of the risks of a startup, but very little of the payoff. That sounds super exploitative tbh. Using people’s passion and naivety to give you free moonshots.

Just like any other internal hackathon-type event

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

#88

Post by offtop5 »

Having worked for several startups I'll argue they're extra overrated. You're very likely to work much harder, what's a holiday when you're the only QA person or the only engineer.

And for what, on the off chance the IPO goes public and you make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Give me a big company job during the day, and I can work on my startup idea at night .

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

#89

Post by nerdponx »

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…

From the data science side of things, this works if and only if upper management has the discipline to leave you alone, including letting you procure your own tooling & compute if needed.

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

#90

Post by kthejoker2 »

Qwertious wrote: post #73
namdnay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah I think we've stumbled on something here.. Spotify seem to be the source/example of all these new management fads. I remember having to sit through that hand-drawn sketch video (is there a name for these things?) describing how Spotify does SAFe (if you don't know what this is, pretend you never read it and continue your life as usual, please) and how awesome it is and why we all need to do it.

What sort of thing is SAFe? Is it some sort of unsuccessful corporate pantomime of a successful practice?

The A stands for Agile if that gives you a clue ...
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