[trjordan]

Most startups fail. Most big company projects are kind of worthless. These are two sides of the same coin.

Producing something novel and valuable is HARD. Unbelievably hard. The idea is hard. The building is harder. The scaling and steering and feedback is ego-crushingly hard.

When it's valuable, it's frequently enormously valuable. That funds the experimentation, the incremental expansion, the waste. It's hard to really internalize how valuable localization, admin controls, FedRAMP, and onboarding tweaks are, truly, because they all compound. You can't just have the idea and the MVP, you also have to have all the other stuff, and it's hard to come up with new ideas while you're trying to keep a million users happy.

I vehemently disagree that people working at big companies are stupid, or making themselves stupid. There are VPs and SVPs at Adobe and Salesforce that are smarter, more knowledgable, and more productive than any startup employee. It's just structurally hard to move the needle there, and their successes aren't written about in TechCrunch. They're also paid a million dollars a year, and are unbothered by the lack of external recognition.

I'm off founding a startup now, and it's good for the soul, but I don't delude myself into thinking everybody else is blind.

[oooyay]

The individual executives I think are smart and I don't think the post discounts that; maybe "blind" is a distracting analogy. What the post draws into question, which I think is relatively common, is how a persons immediate incentives might intrinsically change a person. For instance, a very smart Adobe executive may start to pin engineers against each other to produce better results because they can and it produces results. They may begin to over-reward the few in search of inspiring the many. They may take fewer bets on the future because the status quo is just fine. All things that I think you as a start up founder would not do because you have immediate feedback mechanisms and consequences that signal that could lead to the end of your startup.

If you sat these same executives down in a one-on-one setting and went through a history of things they did and how they might've impacted people I think you'd probably discover some shame and embarrassment once they're removed from the incentive pool. That isn't to say they're bad, just to say that incentives are guides in the dark, and the inside of a massive corporate machina is full of tunnels.

also, hi TR :)

[trjordan]

lmao hi Matt

I agree, though maybe the middle ground is something more like: the constraints of our environments shape us. It's easy to say that big companies are a weird and unique cave that produces weird and unique outcomes, but other companies are somehow constraint-free. Smart, talented founders do weird and constrained things all the time because they don't have capital or customer bases or brands, and those are also constraints that bind just as hard.

"Race for MVP to learn what your bottleneck is" is a handcuff, just like "you can't deploy more than 3x / year because our customer base hates change."

[oooyay]

Yeah I agree with that. I'd also extend this to ICs, but the effect is probably less pronounced as those with much more consequential power.

[dj_gitmo]

> I vehemently disagree that people working at big companies are stupid, or making themselves stupid. There are VPs and SVPs at Adobe and Salesforce that are smarter, more knowledgable, and more productive than any startup employee.

In my experience the problem can be the lower level managers and ICs. If they cannot perform to the industry standard, technical debt will begin to compound, and it will be difficult to adapt. It’s also difficult to improve your standards when the competent people keep leaving, or don’t feel like they can make changes.

[karahime]

I agree with this, and would add that it's hard in part because it's always been hard, and people have overcome. I can only imagine the difficulty of coming up with something like HTTP, or a suspension bridge, or algebra, without the mental scaffolding already being there. If you go back and read the original discussions of these, they include a ton of what seems like circuitous explanation for what we take for granted as "simple" ideas, but which are absolutely not simple at all if you have to pull them from the primordial void sight unseen.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Producing something novel and valuable is HARD

I disagree, producing something valuable is common, and it’s common for scientists / inventors / artists / composers to die poor.

Selling, Capturing the value, and building businesses on top is hard.

[browski]

> I vehemently disagree that people working at big companies are stupid, or making themselves stupid. There are VPs and SVPs at Adobe and Salesforce that are smarter, more knowledgable, and more productive than any startup employee.

That there are outliers in a big group of people is not a big idea.

The issue is that they're outliers while the rest are just there because that's how they earn food and shelter; get job is just how the world works types. Those outliers efforts and communication are then lost to ignorance of the majority who only think in terms of trying to repeat the past/maintain status quo they understand.

For example marketing cannot grok and figure out how to spin a new idea and instead convince management they're "the Photoshop company not whatever this is" to pick the on Adobe.

It's similar to political conservatism, a kind of social conservatism of its own.

If new thing fails they may be fired for bad messaging or glitchy features depending on their role. Feels safer to flog the same old horse too long and fall behind.