Your big company can't be a startup again.

Big companies can’t be startups again.

Often when the C-suite says they want to “be a startup again”, they imagine the early days. When employees acted like owners - where a spark of excellence could create outsized business results. In these early startup days, ICs hold power over massive, org-shaking decisions. They feel the good stress of being given sacred responsibility in the company’s future. And much of the “stress” is intrinsic - the type of stress early employees feel when they have a high sense of ownership.

That’s not life at a big company.

The bigger a company gets, the less an IC’s day is in their control. Coming up with a big idea that creates outsized impact becomes pretty unlikely. You don’t make equivelant impact at $1 billion companies at hackathons. Organizations with mature business models learn to resist innovation (just look at what’s happened with ChatGPT and Google). Google resists innovation because of its strong search market, leading to disruption by a smaller company. They even had an internal LLM chat, but shelved the project! Instead only organizational leaders with large scope create change - usually very slowly, and usually when it aligns to existing business/investor interests.

From a big company IC’s perspective, most of their professional life is outside their control. They work on what they’re told to. That feeling of having great power / responsibility “good stress” at a small company goes away, instead to the extrinsic stress from outside when a new leader swoops in to force your project into a 180 degree tailspin.

To really “drive the business” at a bigger company requires a completely different set of skills. You have to be a politican, capable of aligning dispirate interests, spending a lot of times in meetings, all to steer a very very large ship just a tiny bit.

Only ICs that can take on the politcians role, find leadership sponsors, align with the existing business model, will win in organizational “combat” to have their ideas suceed.

Sure, to some extent, this happens at small companies. And exceptions happen at big companies. But by and large, small companies seeking a business model desperately need innovative new directions. Large companiee, with stable businesses gradually become conservative, focused on defending a business model.

So when a leader says “we want to be like a startup again” it may be a smell they really don’t understand their business, and the role innovation plays (or doesn’t play) in how it’s run.