After we chatted with a bunch of Quibb members about why they moved from a big company to a startup, we wanted to go more in-depth about the differences between big companies and startups. Since so many people are making these transitions lately, we figured it would be helpful to highlight their advice.
#1. Keep It Simple
When Erin Glenn transitioned from working at companies like multinational financial services firm Morgan Stanley to a small startup, she says that “Culturally, it was a big shock! I figured things would be different, but I under-anticipated. It also took a lot longer to adapt than I thought it would, and parts of it were painful. I was breaking big, old habits.
“So for example,” she goes on, “getting ready for board meetings. I had come from a publicly traded company. Preparing for board meetings took weeks, and the board books were detailed with a lot of supporting data. At the startup, it took me a while to realize no one cared about that level of rigor, plus it was truly wasted effort. ”
The lesson here, Glenn says, is that if you’re moving to a startup, you will learn fast to do everything in a stripped-down way. “You’re learning so fast and things change so fast, you can barely keep up to date. So it all has to be simple. What’s the key learning? Boil everything down to its most basic. That’s a skill that takes a lot of work, too.”
#2. Don’t Move Too Fast And Break Too Many Things
Facebook’s (in)famous motto, Move Fast And Break Things, is frequently quoted around startupland. But of course, it’s never that simple. Many startup employees advise others not to get too caught up in the process.
“The big company that I was at before, their product had release cycles every 3–6 months, but at a mobile startup you put out updates every 2–3 weeks,” says Gilad Bonjack. (His previous company was 3,500 people, and he left that company to help with product at Voxer, a messaging startup of 30 people.) “At a startup,” says Bonjack, “these iterations get you a quicker response to market needs — but you might end up making compromises, sometimes in quality, or in the logic behind decision-making. So you have to watch that and not lose your focus on the bigger picture.”
Isaac Souwine went from Yahoo to an incubator called Pollenizer, and from there to Frank & Oak, an online men’s clothing store. On the topic of why those compromises happen, he says: “At startups, you have a lot of freedom to roll stuff out and practice critical thinking, but you spend a lot of that freedom fixing things that are kind of broken. Similarly, if you live in a hippie commune, then you have all kinds of freedom — but sometimes you come in and someone hasn’t done the dishes, so you have to do the dishes. On the other hand, if you live in a super organized and buttoned-up house, then people come to your door at 10:01pm and ask you to turn the music down.
“So how can you get rid of all the bad firefighting and still make decisions quickly?” Souwine asks. “That’s a tough call, and you win some, you lose some.”
#3. Pay Staff In Opportunities And Latitude
Founder of IDoneThis Walter Chen says that one of the things he misses about working at a big company is the “abundance. There’s so much cash. You’re never penny-pinching other people. In some ways, working at a big company like my old law firm is better for young people — there’s more training, and there’s less pressure to make an impact immediately. But in startups, there is often an environment of scarcity, there’s not much of anything, and we can’t take time to train people or bring them up.”
This means that startup founders need to find ways to pay their staff that aren’t financial. “Treat people generously in your own way,” advises Chen.
A lot of people talk about the amount of responsibility they have as a huge motivator behind working at a startup. “”You just roll up your sleeves and figure out how to do it,” says Erin Glenn. “I remember my first day on the job at Kixeye, I’m sitting across from the CEO, and he literally hands me a set of keys and said: ‘These are the keys to our new office, we’re moving in next week, make it happen. Here’s a major contract we need to finalize. Make that happen. We have a new employee starting in two days, and he needs a computer and all that. Make that happen.’ Once you’ve worked in this environment for a few months, there’s no going back, but when you first get there, it feels crazy.”
More concretely, the need for impact means that many startup employees have space to experiment with methods and tools. After working at a bank for years, Francois Mathieu went to a marketing software startup called Uberflip, and he loves how easy it is for him to try new software. “Working at a big company, there’s a lot of constraint in terms of tools, but at a startup it’s about using the best tool for the job,” he says. “At the bank, I was still on Internet Explorer, and I don’t even know what version.”
In The End, The Connections Last, Even If The Startups Don’t
The tech industry is massively intertwined, and it’s super relationship-focused. Michael Rosengarten has worked at many startups, as well as an innovation team within Yahoo; his experience leads him to focus on people above everything else. “My dream is to build campfires, not companies,” he says. “Who stays around the campfire as the night gets later? Who stays in the conversation? Those are the people I want to work with.
“My mission in life is now to build companies where you have people who are passionately committed, but who have work-life balance,” he goes on. “Once you’ve been through a startup once or twice, you realize that it might fail, and you don’t want to sacrifice your work-life balance for something that might fail. But you want to have an ongoing conversation with people who are just as passionate as you are.”
As a final tidbit of advice, Isaac Souwine suggests that tech employees try to perceive company boundaries as permeable. “One thing I talk about a lot to young people is, I see the big Internet companies as a continuum,” says Souwine. “They’re part of a larger ecosystem. The cultures are very distinct, and the way you work at Yahoo or Facebook is not how you work at a company of 50 people, but they are part of an ecosystem, and they feed into each other a lot. So as I moved between jobs, I didn’t find the transitions that hard — I was still in essentially the same industry. I just did what was appropriate to each situation.”
Find other stories about professional experiences like these by joining Quibb. You can follow all these people to see what they’re reading for the jobs they are so passionate about. In alphabetical order, here they are: Gilad Bonjack, and Walter Chen, and Erin Glenn, and Francois Mathieu, and Michael Rosengarten, and Isaac Souwine.
Thanks to Lydia Laurenson, writer and media strategist, for her work on this series.
