>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 "start

>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.