Moving from startup to large company

A few weeks back, although it seems like ages ago now, Appcelerator was bought and merged with a global software company named Axway. I’ve had a lot of friends ask me “what was it like?”. Truthfuly my answer has been: anti-climatic.

Truthfully, I’m struggling a bit with the right answer. Not that “anti-climatic” isn’t 100% truthful — it is. But, transitioning from a small startup (~100 people) to one that is much bigger (>2,000) isn’t just about the size or the product or the scale — of course it’s all of those things. But it’s about all the change that comes with it — both real and perceived.

In some ways, my job is still the same and in other ways, it’s completely different. Holding such diametrically opposed emotions has been a little tough so far — I must admit.

First, there has been a huge identity crisis. As the co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, I and my co-founder had our entire identity (both professional and personal), wrapped up into the thing we started together back in the summer of 2006. Since my kids were very small, all they knew was Appcelerator. And same with my marriage. My co-founder, Nolan, in fact got married after starting Appcelerator. Appcelerator was “family” and we felt deep emotions to everything Appcelerator. It was never just “a job”. And over so many years, we developed so many deep personal friendships with people who are still here and many who have long moved on to other adventures. Our employees, investors, customers, partners and our community has become so much of a reflection about who we are personally — it’s really hard to think about ourselves outside of that. It’s what makes founders and the companies they start different and unique. We have always said that if we were going to spend literally all of our energy and time working on something, we wanted to be surrounded by people we enjoyed being around. Not necessarily people just like us, but people on a mission and sharing and improving upon the vision that we had together. We always wanted an organization of shared values and, in Appcelerator, we had that.

Second, some of the problems we had as a startup are the same now, just a little bit bigger and with a little bit more complexity. Some people assume that you move from being a startup and you get acquired by a big(ger) company that you all of a sudden are swimming in resources — just go over and requisition them and out will pop a whole set of people who have just been waiting idle for you to show up. Don’t get me wrong, big companies come with all sorts of things that small companies don’t have or can’t justify (I.T. department, H.R. group, matching 401(k), hello?). And Axway so far is making good on the promise of investing and scaling Appcelerator. But, big companies often have all the same problems but at a different scale. There are never, ever enough resources to do what you want (and often need) to do. Frankly, the best run companies still starve their organizations to produce the best results (OK, “starve” is probably overboard, but I like to think of it like producing a great Cabernet Sauvignon). A little over a year ago I got the chance (along with some other CEOs) to have dinner with the Oracle co-CEO, Mark Hurd. There was a question at dinner that someone proposed about how his job and his problems were different than ours — a group of CEOs here in Silicon Valley. His answer was a little surprising at the time, but in retrospect completely understandable now: I have all the same problems you do, I just have them at a much bigger scale. I can now appreciate that with a different understanding than before. Now the difference between how problems are solved and techniques available can be wildly different between the two. At a startup if we had an issue, we had 100% empowerment (and expectation) to solve it ourselves — and without delay. In a larger company, that can be difficult in a lot of cases. Bigger companies have process, policies, people who “do that job” and frankly, gravity towards the “way it has always been done” that keeps it a lot less fluid and agile. In larger companies, “buy in” sometimes is replaced with “making decisions” since it often helps ensure good alignment and frankly is often used as a disguise for direct responsibility of outcomes (“we all agreed to it so it’s not my fault”). And these aren’t for terrible reasons in most cases — can you imagine someone making a decision on behalf of a public company with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of turnover — and them not be authorized to make it?

Third, the “process” of decision making and execution is much different between a startup and a larger company. In a startup, you have meetings to “synchronize” and “make decisions” or “communicate decisions”. In larger companies, meetings are much less about making any decision at all — they are much more about discussion and alignment around discussions (and “pre-meetings” to synchronize on other meetings LOL). And, bigger companies love their meetings. Bigger companies have meetings for everything. Alignment meetings, steering meetings, discussion meetings, resource meetings, priority meetings, you name it — they’ve got a meeting for that. In bigger companies, people are literally all over the world. So, meetings are the way larger companies often communicate and organize themselves especially as they are widely distributed. In smaller companies, you communicate more asynchronously and while we have our share of “meetings”, we prefer “standups” (short sync meetings) and we try and use meetings to help ensure alignment and execution. At Appcelerator we use Flowdock to keep everyone “in the loop” and often make decisions on-the-fly there. We use a wiki to capture “tribal knowledge” and we have tried to automate and use systems for everything (Netsuite, BambooHR, Salesforce, AWS, Wordpress, Github, Recurly, JIRA … you name it, we automated it). Coming from a smaller company and going to a larger company, you’ll often find yourself asking “what do all these people do?”. Attend and few meetings and you’ll understand — they attend meetings all day (and do things that could be digitally enabled). In a smaller company, you can’t afford to not automate it, you just don’t have enough resources that you can afford to throw at the problem. (And don’t get me started on what I call “document production” at bigger companies).

So, yeah, nothing has really changed. But everything has.

The journey so far has been great. The people at Axway are all the things you’d hope for in an organization — smart, driven, humble. Our colleagues have been more than accommodating and excited to work with us and we’re very excited to continue on this journey with them. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity ahead of us.