[pmoriarty]

"In my experience (30+ years in all kinds and sizes of companies), the quality of management is the absolute worst in startups."

Another datapoint: my own managers at startups were better by far than those at larger companies. Generally, the smaller the company, the better.

The absolute best was when it was just me and the company's owner working together. No corporate bullshit. In that instance, my manager didn't have to appease any executives above him. He just decided what had to get done and we did it. Very often I'd have meaningful contributions to make to the decision making process, and we'd decide what needed to get done together.

Try doing that in a large company where there are N levels of middle management above you, bullshit corporate policy and compliance to adhere to, people in different offices and time zones who haven't a clue about who you are or what you think making your decisions for you, and so on.

I can't even count the number of times when managers in larger companies that I've worked at have told me that they really want to do the right thing, but their hands are tied... so we do the wrong, broken thing because we don't have any choice. At startups there tends to be a lot more freedom, if we make mistakes, at least they're our mistakes, not ones forced on us by clueless/insulated upper management.

[Sangermaine]

>The absolute best was when it was just me and the company's owner working together.

You're just reinforcing the parent's point that "[t]he secret sauce of startups is that in the very early phase there is no management."