It's easy for startups to be nimble because they have no legacy processes to maintain. The startup may have 5 guys in a warehouse building their product, while

It's easy for startups to be nimble because they have no legacy processes to maintain. The startup may have 5 guys in a warehouse building their product, while the big company has 100 people on a $10M assembly line. When the startup wants to scale by 20%, they work longer hours or add another worker. If they didn't plan properly and find that they don't have another workstation for that worker, they buy a table at OfficeDepot and there's their new workstation. The assembly line might need an entire process flow redesign to add more workstations, plus a physical reconfiguration, software changes, etc. If a developer just blindly adds a parameter that adds 10% to the workday without going through reviews and tests, he may find out from the physical plant engineers that they no longer have enough time to do preventative maintenance so they need to scheduled an outage to do deferred maintenance. There's a reason why process exists in large companies, and it's not just for the sake of process. That small startup might be able to usurp the large corporation, but the large company still has an advantage in throughput and/or efficiency. The corporation can promise Walmart that they'll have 100,000 units delivered by Dec 1st... to meet the same goal, the small startup might have to scale their workflow 100X, and they can't do that by scaling from 5 guys in a warehouse to 500 guys in a warehouse.