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I mean, sure, but it also misses the point a bit. "Startup in a big company" doesn't mean "yo take some cashdollar and try build and release something to the pu

I mean, sure, but it also misses the point a bit. "Startup in a big company" doesn't mean "yo take some cashdollar and try build and release something to the public", but it does mean "hey, take a small team and do your own thing with less oversight and process overhead from higher-ups". The team I worked in at AWS was like this and it felt a lot like startup teams I've worked with. That didn't mean we could take 'brand and legal risk', and if that's what you want then definitely go and start your own thing. If you want more autonomy and higher velocity than is normal at corporates, then a 'startup within a big company' might actually work out for you.

bovermyer 6y ago
Yeah, this. People who are used to actual startup culture and talk about how "startups" at big companies don't work have a different internalized concept of what startup autonomy looks like. The success criteria are different, and measured differently.
virgilp 6y ago
While I worked for Adobe, one of the executives there (Mark Randall, serial entrepreneur that was "acquired" by the company, awesome guy) launched the "Red box" initiative that eventually become https://www.kickbox.org/ https://www.kickbox.org/. The red box was essentially a "toolbox" that he created on how to build a startup (set of training materials + $1000USD credit card that you could use however you wish), and the purpose was to get enough proof so that you get executive buy-in to continue your idea - if you achieved that, you got the "blue box" (whose content was a "secret" but was essentially custom-tailored support for your project). The entire process banks on the fact that you validate your ideas _without_ involving the Adobe brand, because if you slapped "Adobe" over it of course people and press would get interested. There were some legal caveats here and there (e.g. you couldn't outright lie and claim you were _not_ with Adobe), but I think it is to some extent the closest thing that you can get to "startup within a big company". I personally got to the blue box - but then I gave up, when I realized that to get it to actually ship I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. Which would have been maybe fine - except that I knew that I didn't get to keep any upside. I had most of the risks of a startup, but very little of the payoff. Great learning process, but for me - it only managed to convince me that I shouldn't try within a corporation, if I want to try I need to actually do it by myself.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Super interesting. Would you mind sharing more about it?
  - virgilp 6y ago
    I wouldn't mind, but I don't know what - ask if you have specific questions. There's ample material on https://kickbox.org https://kickbox.org and https://home.getkickbox.com/ https://home.getkickbox.com/ (basically all the contents of the red box, minus the cash), plus it appears one even has access to a "kickbox community" from what I can tell.
- aloer 6y ago
  Is the expectation with the kickbox that you work on your idea in your own time or was there a process to work on it during work hours as well?
  - virgilp 6y ago
    Basically, you work it out with your managers/ organization. Getting the resources to do the product is part of the challenge.
  - thinkmassive 6y ago
    In the link[1] virgilp shared it says red box participants get 1000 CHF budget, 20% of working time, and access to experts. So they want you to prove out your idea with an allocation of one workday per week. I’d bet most people have to add their own nights and weekends to make it successful. 1: https://home.getkickbox.com/ https://home.getkickbox.com/
    - virgilp 6y ago
      Do note that they appear to have fine-tuned the program. I was one of the early participants - initially the blue box was a "secret" because Mark Randall genuinely didn't know what to put in it. In the meanwhile, the blue box was refined and it appears that a gold box turned up. True to his form, he approached the entire process as an MVP that was evolved & enhanced in time.
pembrook 6y ago
Sounds like in your case it worked out, but I would consider AWS to be an insane outlier...also from a company still founder-led (Bezos is an exec with proven startup success--hence why Amazon exists in the first place!). I think the point of the author is that, inside a big company, the fundamental risk/reward incentives that drive startup innovation are removed. Autonomy alone doesn't drive people to make crazy decisions. Risk/reward incentives do. Google is never going to say to one of their internal employees: "We're cutting your salary to $50k/yr, but you get 80% ownership of the business you create if you succeed. But there's a 95% chance you won't. And if you don't succeed you're fired. Good luck!" That's the equivalent environment needed if you want to mimic the human decisions and behavior that drive innovation inside startups.
- varjag 6y ago
  That's the environment startups exist in due to economic realities of having little money to go on rather than some grand strategy. There is a possibility a better balance of risk/reward (say 5% of ownership and 150k salary) could well produce just as good or better outcomes.
  - pembrook 6y ago
    The problem is, if this employee is the perfect person to create this business, why are they working at Google and not on their own starting this venture already? Why waste time letting one of your clearly risk averse in-house employees (hence why they work at Google in the first place), fumble around for 5-10 years trying to build something? While your competitors might be doing the same thing and will actually succeed? And while the rest of your employees start complaining, "why can't we also play startup for 5-10 years on the Google gravy train like John?" Google can just sit back and let the real startup ecosystem do its thing. Then buy whatever they see that has shown success in areas of strategic value to Google. No PR or legal risk while the startup does necessary but shady things to force itself into being. This is a much better model, hence why innovation is most often acquired, not incubated.
    - varjag 6y ago
bitwize 6y ago
The word for this is "skunkworks". Even the most independent skunkworks still serves big-company goals, often taking advantage of big-company resources and generating IP for the big company. In some ways, a skunkworks is startup-like but in many critical ways it's way different.
- teleforce 6y ago
  Just came here to say this. The popular examples were the legendary work at Lockheed Martin, and also at Bell Lab for Unix. I was under the impression that Unix was well supported in the beginning at Bell Lab. Apparently according Ken it's not so and initially they need to piggyback on a grant that did not even mentioned OS or system research due the outstanding issues with the Multics project.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  Honestly just working on something without an existing user base makes a huge difference. There's a certain amount of institutional crud that's just crud, but most of it exists because once you are successful, you can lose what you have more easily than gaining something new. Millions or billions of people use the major products FAANGs provide. They might get more users if they make these products better, and boy howdy are there a thousand ambitious devs, PMs, and managers trying, but they'll also lose millions of users if they make them worse. Hell, they'll lose millions of users if they make them different, regardless of whether it is better or worse. 90% of institutional crud is "how can we not piss off the billion people who are happily using our products and giving us money, either directly or indirectly?". Users hate it when our product breaks, so we're going to have excruciating review and approval processes to submit code changes, style guides and minimum test coverage and an entire campus devoted to monitoring for problems. Users hate it when their personal data gets leaked or abused, so we're going to set up razor wire and require devs to go on a quest for mystical artifacts before they can do anything with it. Users hate it when the site changes so we're going to require a dissertation in the form of a sonnet explaining why the color of the buttons should change, and then six months of live experiments to be sure. 90% of what you hate as a user about big companies is the result of them "acting like a startup" and radically redesigning UIs or changing the core functionality of a product or breaking existing functionality to add new or just developing a new product out of nowhere and presenting it to you like you should care.
andrewguenther 6y ago
Agreed on this feeling within AWS. The product I worked on came out of an engineering brainstorming meeting, we had to get it funded, small team, etc. Felt very much like startups I've worked at before and was part of the reason I stayed at AWS so long.
nerdponx 6y ago
From the data science side of things, this works if and only if upper management has the discipline to leave you alone, including letting you procure your own tooling & compute if needed.
bitcharmer 6y ago
Glad you shared your experience. The title of the article is completely misleading and many people in the comments who claim it's impossible are either wrong or don't understand the meaning of this phrase. I have been a (very happy) part of two such startup-within-a-big-corpo initiatives during my career in investment banking. Although on different (in my opinion: better) terms, it does happen, although quite rare.
bluefirebrand 6y ago
> "yo take some cashdollar and try build and release something to the public", but it does mean "hey, take a small team and do your own thing with less oversight and process overhead from higher-ups" Or what we used to just call "An R&D department"
apohn 6y ago
>but it does mean "hey, take a small team and do your own thing with less oversight and process overhead from higher-ups". If you are interviewing for a "startup in a big company" job, one of the first questions you should ask is "how much oversight and process do we have from the larger company?" Make sure you ask a lot of questions about how decisions are made, who the product is being built for, how it is being sold, etc. I've worked in two "startups" in two very different big companies. In both situations, the every major decision had to go through the larger org, which meant basically the whole thing was a waste. The only things that were approved were things the big company was already doing. I'll provide a concrete example. I was involved in a product where our people had to work with the larger account execs of existing customers. The idea was the account execs could take the product to existing customers easily and grow very rapidly. What really happened was the account execs refused to put the product in front of customers unless it fit into the larger enterprise architecture strategy. They didn't need a startup - they needed a typical huge enterprise software team. So basically the product that got built was a completely half-baked POS that only looked good on slides. It was a market failure.
caturopath 6y ago
I was really shocked to see into a couple 'startup in a big company' teams at my company and to realize just how little they actually went off-leash. I don't know the details -- how much of it is not being allowed, how much of it is people who've worked here 10 years believing we're doing things the right way -- but I was really taken aback by the number of things they had to slow them down and the amount of oversight that seemed to be in place, given the general concept.
lamontcg 6y ago
The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. That team was very, very far removed from Amazon proper and actually delivered. That's probably the only time I've seen that kind of startup-with-a-large-corporation work. I can think of other examples (like Amazon's google-competing search engine) which tried to copy that and failed pretty completely. I suspect other successful things that happened after I was there were run as "startups" though (I'd guess Alexa?). But in general every other time I've seen those happen at other companies they've been completely miserable failures. Working in IT, usually those "startups" are full of Dunning Krugers who mostly go to war against the corporate IT and don't actually have very good business ideas (and honestly the corporate IT has been run like crap and deserved it, but that doesn't actually help launch your product). They're usually fed a bunch of ego-food about how they're the special children which will entirely transform the next generation of the company, and then they wind up fighting with everyone else.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. AWS did indeed start out with E-commerce Services (2002) and Alexa Internet APIs (2004), but in mid-2003, when Andy Jassy took over AWS from Colin Bryar, he completely changed its charter to build an "Internet Operating System" instead. EC2 happened in South Africa in 2004 after Jassy and others had ear-marked compute as one of the key building blocks, along with Storage (S3) and Database (RDS / SimpleDB). In fact, S3 launched before EC2 did. SQS launched even before that, in 2004, though in limited beta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History
  - lamontcg 6y ago
    Yeah, it was a bit messier than that though. There was a ton of internal politics between 2004-2006, that Wikipage makes it sound way too clean. You're right though that S3 and SQS launched before EC2 did, but EC2 was highly politically charged internally. I don't know that it would have happened if they didn't ship development off to South Africa.

bovermyer 6y ago

Yeah, this. People who are used to actual startup culture and talk about how "startups" at big companies don't work have a different internalized concept of what startup autonomy looks like. The success criteria are different, and measured differently.

virgilp 6y ago

While I worked for Adobe, one of the executives there (Mark Randall, serial entrepreneur that was "acquired" by the company, awesome guy) launched the "Red box" initiative that eventually become https://www.kickbox.org/ https://www.kickbox.org/. The red box was essentially a "toolbox" that he created on how to build a startup (set of training materials + $1000USD credit card that you could use however you wish), and the purpose was to get enough proof so that you get executive buy-in to continue your idea - if you achieved that, you got the "blue box" (whose content was a "secret" but was essentially custom-tailored support for your project). The entire process banks on the fact that you validate your ideas _without_ involving the Adobe brand, because if you slapped "Adobe" over it of course people and press would get interested. There were some legal caveats here and there (e.g. you couldn't outright lie and claim you were _not_ with Adobe), but I think it is to some extent the closest thing that you can get to "startup within a big company". I personally got to the blue box - but then I gave up, when I realized that to get it to actually ship I had to sacrifice nights and weekends. Which would have been maybe fine - except that I knew that I didn't get to keep any upside. I had most of the risks of a startup, but very little of the payoff. Great learning process, but for me - it only managed to convince me that I shouldn't try within a corporation, if I want to try I need to actually do it by myself.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Super interesting. Would you mind sharing more about it?
- virgilp 6y ago
  I wouldn't mind, but I don't know what - ask if you have specific questions. There's ample material on https://kickbox.org https://kickbox.org and https://home.getkickbox.com/ https://home.getkickbox.com/ (basically all the contents of the red box, minus the cash), plus it appears one even has access to a "kickbox community" from what I can tell.
aloer 6y ago
Is the expectation with the kickbox that you work on your idea in your own time or was there a process to work on it during work hours as well?
- virgilp 6y ago
  Basically, you work it out with your managers/ organization. Getting the resources to do the product is part of the challenge.
- thinkmassive 6y ago
  In the link[1] virgilp shared it says red box participants get 1000 CHF budget, 20% of working time, and access to experts. So they want you to prove out your idea with an allocation of one workday per week. I’d bet most people have to add their own nights and weekends to make it successful. 1: https://home.getkickbox.com/ https://home.getkickbox.com/
  - virgilp 6y ago
    Do note that they appear to have fine-tuned the program. I was one of the early participants - initially the blue box was a "secret" because Mark Randall genuinely didn't know what to put in it. In the meanwhile, the blue box was refined and it appears that a gold box turned up. True to his form, he approached the entire process as an MVP that was evolved & enhanced in time.

pembrook 6y ago

Sounds like in your case it worked out, but I would consider AWS to be an insane outlier...also from a company still founder-led (Bezos is an exec with proven startup success--hence why Amazon exists in the first place!). I think the point of the author is that, inside a big company, the fundamental risk/reward incentives that drive startup innovation are removed. Autonomy alone doesn't drive people to make crazy decisions. Risk/reward incentives do. Google is never going to say to one of their internal employees: "We're cutting your salary to $50k/yr, but you get 80% ownership of the business you create if you succeed. But there's a 95% chance you won't. And if you don't succeed you're fired. Good luck!" That's the equivalent environment needed if you want to mimic the human decisions and behavior that drive innovation inside startups.

varjag 6y ago
That's the environment startups exist in due to economic realities of having little money to go on rather than some grand strategy. There is a possibility a better balance of risk/reward (say 5% of ownership and 150k salary) could well produce just as good or better outcomes.
- pembrook 6y ago
  The problem is, if this employee is the perfect person to create this business, why are they working at Google and not on their own starting this venture already? Why waste time letting one of your clearly risk averse in-house employees (hence why they work at Google in the first place), fumble around for 5-10 years trying to build something? While your competitors might be doing the same thing and will actually succeed? And while the rest of your employees start complaining, "why can't we also play startup for 5-10 years on the Google gravy train like John?" Google can just sit back and let the real startup ecosystem do its thing. Then buy whatever they see that has shown success in areas of strategic value to Google. No PR or legal risk while the startup does necessary but shady things to force itself into being. This is a much better model, hence why innovation is most often acquired, not incubated.
  - varjag 6y ago

bitwize 6y ago

The word for this is "skunkworks". Even the most independent skunkworks still serves big-company goals, often taking advantage of big-company resources and generating IP for the big company. In some ways, a skunkworks is startup-like but in many critical ways it's way different.

teleforce 6y ago
Just came here to say this. The popular examples were the legendary work at Lockheed Martin, and also at Bell Lab for Unix. I was under the impression that Unix was well supported in the beginning at Bell Lab. Apparently according Ken it's not so and initially they need to piggyback on a grant that did not even mentioned OS or system research due the outstanding issues with the Multics project.
saalweachter 6y ago
Honestly just working on something without an existing user base makes a huge difference. There's a certain amount of institutional crud that's just crud, but most of it exists because once you are successful, you can lose what you have more easily than gaining something new. Millions or billions of people use the major products FAANGs provide. They might get more users if they make these products better, and boy howdy are there a thousand ambitious devs, PMs, and managers trying, but they'll also lose millions of users if they make them worse. Hell, they'll lose millions of users if they make them different, regardless of whether it is better or worse. 90% of institutional crud is "how can we not piss off the billion people who are happily using our products and giving us money, either directly or indirectly?". Users hate it when our product breaks, so we're going to have excruciating review and approval processes to submit code changes, style guides and minimum test coverage and an entire campus devoted to monitoring for problems. Users hate it when their personal data gets leaked or abused, so we're going to set up razor wire and require devs to go on a quest for mystical artifacts before they can do anything with it. Users hate it when the site changes so we're going to require a dissertation in the form of a sonnet explaining why the color of the buttons should change, and then six months of live experiments to be sure. 90% of what you hate as a user about big companies is the result of them "acting like a startup" and radically redesigning UIs or changing the core functionality of a product or breaking existing functionality to add new or just developing a new product out of nowhere and presenting it to you like you should care.

andrewguenther 6y ago

Agreed on this feeling within AWS. The product I worked on came out of an engineering brainstorming meeting, we had to get it funded, small team, etc. Felt very much like startups I've worked at before and was part of the reason I stayed at AWS so long.

nerdponx 6y ago

From the data science side of things, this works if and only if upper management has the discipline to leave you alone, including letting you procure your own tooling & compute if needed.

bitcharmer 6y ago

Glad you shared your experience. The title of the article is completely misleading and many people in the comments who claim it's impossible are either wrong or don't understand the meaning of this phrase. I have been a (very happy) part of two such startup-within-a-big-corpo initiatives during my career in investment banking. Although on different (in my opinion: better) terms, it does happen, although quite rare.

bluefirebrand 6y ago

> "yo take some cashdollar and try build and release something to the public", but it does mean "hey, take a small team and do your own thing with less oversight and process overhead from higher-ups" Or what we used to just call "An R&D department"

apohn 6y ago

>but it does mean "hey, take a small team and do your own thing with less oversight and process overhead from higher-ups". If you are interviewing for a "startup in a big company" job, one of the first questions you should ask is "how much oversight and process do we have from the larger company?" Make sure you ask a lot of questions about how decisions are made, who the product is being built for, how it is being sold, etc. I've worked in two "startups" in two very different big companies. In both situations, the every major decision had to go through the larger org, which meant basically the whole thing was a waste. The only things that were approved were things the big company was already doing. I'll provide a concrete example. I was involved in a product where our people had to work with the larger account execs of existing customers. The idea was the account execs could take the product to existing customers easily and grow very rapidly. What really happened was the account execs refused to put the product in front of customers unless it fit into the larger enterprise architecture strategy. They didn't need a startup - they needed a typical huge enterprise software team. So basically the product that got built was a completely half-baked POS that only looked good on slides. It was a market failure.

caturopath 6y ago

I was really shocked to see into a couple 'startup in a big company' teams at my company and to realize just how little they actually went off-leash. I don't know the details -- how much of it is not being allowed, how much of it is people who've worked here 10 years believing we're doing things the right way -- but I was really taken aback by the number of things they had to slow them down and the amount of oversight that seemed to be in place, given the general concept.

lamontcg 6y ago

The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. That team was very, very far removed from Amazon proper and actually delivered. That's probably the only time I've seen that kind of startup-with-a-large-corporation work. I can think of other examples (like Amazon's google-competing search engine) which tried to copy that and failed pretty completely. I suspect other successful things that happened after I was there were run as "startups" though (I'd guess Alexa?). But in general every other time I've seen those happen at other companies they've been completely miserable failures. Working in IT, usually those "startups" are full of Dunning Krugers who mostly go to war against the corporate IT and don't actually have very good business ideas (and honestly the corporate IT has been run like crap and deserved it, but that doesn't actually help launch your product). They're usually fed a bunch of ego-food about how they're the special children which will entirely transform the next generation of the company, and then they wind up fighting with everyone else.

ignoramous 6y ago
> The creation of EC2 originally (which at the time was not AWS -- AWS was originally the XML-RPC and SOAP APIs that allowed people to interact with the www.amazon.com website) was done by a skunkworks project in South Africa. AWS did indeed start out with E-commerce Services (2002) and Alexa Internet APIs (2004), but in mid-2003, when Andy Jassy took over AWS from Colin Bryar, he completely changed its charter to build an "Internet Operating System" instead. EC2 happened in South Africa in 2004 after Jassy and others had ear-marked compute as one of the key building blocks, along with Storage (S3) and Database (RDS / SimpleDB). In fact, S3 launched before EC2 did. SQS launched even before that, in 2004, though in limited beta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWS#History
- lamontcg 6y ago
  Yeah, it was a bit messier than that though. There was a ton of internal politics between 2004-2006, that Wikipage makes it sound way too clean. You're right though that S3 and SQS launched before EC2 did, but EC2 was highly politically charged internally. I don't know that it would have happened if they didn't ship development off to South Africa.