
Startups Aren't Cool Anymore - lnguyen
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/12/milennial-start-up/567793/
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mindcrime
This article strikes me as a mish-mash of moderately interesting insights, and
stuff that's completely off-base. But this bit stands out as worthy of further
discussion:

 _While the Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter is best known for
his 1942 paper describing his theory of “creative destruction,” the process of
disrupting existing industries through business innovation or technological
change, few people know about another prediction he made: He believed that
innovation would gradually become an embedded process within large
corporations. In many ways, Schumpeter predicted the internal innovation hubs
of corporate giants like Amazon and SAP. With incumbents making innovation
part of their established routines, he theorized, they would gradually squeeze
out the traditional entrepreneur._

I have a ton of respect for Schumpeter, and am generally a big fan of his
work. But I disagree with this somewhat. And the reason is that the advantages
big companies have when it comes to innovation, are often largely offset by
other aspects of being a big company. So yes, you have money, smart people,
plenty of high end hardware or cloud resources, data, etc. Great... guess what
you also have?

A stifling bureaucracy, 23 redundant layers of management approval, 12
competing teams each trying to stab the other in the back, arbitrary layoffs /
shuffling of people between teams, executives playing favorites on choosing
what projects to fund, nepotism, etc., etc. etc.

Example: I work for a Really Big Company (but not FAANG), and I routinely see
us take - literally - weeks or months to make a decision that a startup could
make in a day, because the founder could just say "do it" and that's the end
of the story. Yes, yes, it's an anecdote, but this is hardly an unknown
phenomenon. And I've seen this first-hand in plenty of other companies as
well.

I would argue that startups can still disrupt things, but that they key to
doing it is to focus on their natural advantage: speed.

See also: _It 's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the
Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business_.[1]

[1]: [https://www.amazon.com/Its-That-Small-Fast-
Slow/dp/006662054...](https://www.amazon.com/Its-That-Small-Fast-
Slow/dp/0066620546)

~~~
roymurdock
You haven't seen how AWS operates. Their agility is truly something else.
Microsoft is trying to shift within their Azure group to be more like AWS, but
it's a DNA/company policy/pace of work thing. Can't speak for the other FAANG
companies as I don't cover them. If you work for one of the old large
companies - IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc. just know that AWS' pace of getting things
done and shipped is probably 5-10x (with comparably low retention)

~~~
mindcrime
_You haven 't seen how AWS operates. Their agility is truly something else._

Oh yeah, I'm sure there are exceptions. And looking at the from the outside,
AWS do impress with how quickly the get new stuff out.

But I've seen this kind of thing in multiple large companies first-hand, and
the phenomenon has been observed and documented plenty over the years. So I
feel pretty confident that it's still the case that many, if not most, Big
Megacorp types lack the kind of agility that startups typically have.

------
bartl
I am not going to read that, because of the huge number of ads on that page.

~~~
aagha
They're giving you their content for free. It's a transaction--you want
something, you pay for it. In the case of free content from an excellent
magazine, in the form of ads.

If you want to steal it, install an ad blocker.

You can also buy the magazine in paper form, but you'd probably get upset
because there's ads in there too.

