A startup is not only a new company, its a leadership mentality
The value of agility and speed vs structure and stability
We always say the best way to start your career is to work in a startup, and also say the best way to start your career is NOT to work in a startup rather work in an established company with strong brand recognition as it will help you later when you decide to leave or find a better opportunity and generally have a positive impact on your career. But why is that? why is there contradictory sentiments towards working in a startup? Let’s revise what you read so far:
1- Start in a startup: doing a lot of things and playing many roles will increase your learning curve, taking responsibilities early on in your career and sharpening your skills, giving you high exposure to all aspects of the value chain
2- Start in a corporate: learning about teamwork, structure, discipline and how a complex machine moves forward, delivering value while being diligent and cautious.
> For clarification purposes this is not a comparison to help you pick your career path, rather it’s for leaders who aim to start a new company coming from a corporate background, and how could it affect your employees.
Of course the topic is much more complex than that and I do not aim to cover all aspects of it rather share my thoughts about the startup mentality in the context of leadership in a simple, numerical form of intra-connected ideas.
Idea1: when you work for large corporations, you learn how to align things with lots of different stakeholders, you learn how the decision making processes work which is valuable and a skill in itself, but if you want to work or start a new startup or in a smaller company, other things are important
Idea2: startups and new small companies put a lot of emphasis on the value of moving fast and breaking things, its often better to just getting things done than getting them right perfectly and this is not the mindset that large corporations have.
Idea3: because of the magnitude and the size of these corporations and other implications like corporate politics if things go wrong and the rigor internal alignment and quality assurance processes (and later internal audits) these companies will teach you to be cautious, to make sure you cover your back, that you made sure you have checked all possibilities that could go wrong before you come up with a new concept and then lobby for a buy-in to propose it to the senior management.
Idea4: in the startup world, being thorough and being diligent is not that important, you need to be quick, agile, you need to experiment & implement many things at once while knowing its okay if half of those things don’t work. For that you have to have situational awareness and an understanding of your environment and to trust your judgment. This is a way of doing things that doesn’t put a lot of focus on being polished and corporate, but just getting things done. This is the agile, startup mentality that you will lack from working in large corporations
So, what’s the take from this? I offer two perspectives, one as a leader in a corporation that aims to start a new company, while the other is for the person who wants to join a startup:
As a leader: make sure you are aware of the background and the practices that you bring with you from the corporate world, make sure you have a healthy balance between being structured, aligned and diligent to agile and speed as this will be crucial to the success of your new venture.
As a person joining a startup: make sure you understand the aspects of startuping, the startup methodology and agility and make it a top priority to screen your leadership for these qualities. Otherwise you will find yourself in a place that is slow and imitates big corporations when in fact is small and fragile.
As a final note, corporations are not big dumb machines that conducts its day to day business this way by choice, rather its an inevitable step in the evolution of a small company. Being agile and breaking things does not work very well when you reach your 100 employee. But until then, make sure you don’t bring a corporate-like mindset to a new small company.
