From Mighty Dog to Underdog
For the last few weeks, I’ve been marinating on an idea for a blog post about going from a big company to the startup world. It didn’t come out the way I wanted, so I shelved it. Yesterday, Michael Arrington published a post entitled “Are You A Pirate?” that talks about entrepreneurs and analogizing them to pirates.
It helped re-jigger my post, so I re-jiggered. And here it is:
I knew jumping from Google to the startup world would be an adjustment. Now that it’s been about two months since I began both working with startups and at a startup (yes, I consider 500 Startups one too, albeit not a typical startup), I can say now that I didn’t realize just how big an adjustment it would be. Don’t get me wrong - I am having a great time and learning a lot. In fact, the best part about what I do now is all the brilliant people I have the honor of meeting and learning from. That includes our startup founders, our mentors, and friends of 500.
That said, since my life at Google is still fresh in my mind, I’ve noticed a couple things fairly quickly:
- The Big Company Aversion: Naturally, in the startup/VC world, entrepreneurs are lauded. Splashed across TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOM are tales of startups’ fundraising successes, product launches, acquisitions, graduates of startup incubator programs, VC drama, and more. And it isn’t uncommon to hear remarks that you’re living a life half-lived if you choose the safer path of a ‘nice, cushy, well-paying’ job at a big company. Occasionally there are judgments about people’s choices to do so. That if you’re been in such a job for more than X number of years, it implies something negative about you or your character and your skills are non-transferrable to the startup world.
- The Anti-Corporate Culture: To certain people, big companies conjure up images of Dilbert, Office Space, grey cubicles, office politics, and bureaucratic red tape. So they start instituting rules for their own startups to be as “un-corporate” as possible. The one most obvious example is the “no meeting” rule. Yet the desire to avoid being corporate can manifest itself in many ways.
As someone who was at a big company for many years, I have a visceral reaction to these opinions. I’ll start with the first - big company vs. startup.
Now I have all the respect in the world for entrepreneurs who decide to risk it all to build a business from the ground up. I admire them enough to want to work w/ them and be in a position where I can help make their lives easier. Because I sure as hell don’t have the chops to be one myself. However, I really, really hate the attitude that there’s something wrong with people who choose to stay at big companies. That it says something negative about who they are as a person - risk-averse, lazy, can’t hustle, corporate, boring. Seriously? If someone had the gall to accuse me of that when I was still at Google, I would tear them a new one. Not kidding. I’ve never worked as hard in my life as I did when I was working on Google I/O. And for anyone to brush that off because it wasn’t a true entrepreneurial/startup experience? OH HAYULL NO.
The second point - being anti-corporate. I suppose it depends on whether this is coming from someone who’s actually worked in corporate life or not. Yes, there are politics and there is bureaucracy in big companies. It’s just what you have to deal with. Sometimes it drives you up the wall. But I strongly believe who you are as a person and how you respond to it matters far more.
What I’ve learned, all of which I feel has helped me in my role now:
- How to deal with all kinds of people. Fact is, you can’t choose who you work with all the time. There are tons of great people, yet also tons of lunatics. You have to be able to work w/ all of them.
- How to get things done. People argue this is what’s crippling big companies. But on the flip side, you’re often under pressure to produce results and, as a result, you actually do stuff.
- How to act professional. This comes in quite handy w/ the 1st point and in meeting w/ potential partners, sponsors, etc.
- How to run meetings efficiently. People are anti-meetings because they’re so poorly run. But in my case, I feel like my experience at Google has really helped me here.
- How to work as a team. Some things may initially seem contrived (ex. weekly meetings, taking notes, team lunches, etc) but they help more than you realize.
I’ll close by saying this: I have many friends and colleagues across big companies - at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Adobe, Apple, Intel, and more. They’re all outstanding people doing outstanding things. The fact that they’re happy where they are doesn’t, in any way, make me think less of who they are and what they’ve accomplished. Yes, if they decided to venture into a startup, I would applaud them. But I applaud them no less even if they stay where they are. Because innovation can happen anywhere.
