Stop glorifying startups

Smaller is not always better

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I regularly run into exasperated executives who are shocked and annoyed that they don’t work in a startup anymore. “Why do we have to do all of this stuff?”, one recently lamented when reviewing a project roadmap. “Back when we were still a startup, I could just phone someone and then they got it done.” Another executive I worked with a while back had a similar bout of nostalgia.”It’s become so hard to figure out who to talk to in order to get something done,” she said. "In a startup, I can just get on the phone and call someone and then it gets done."

My first thought when contemplating these events was that executives apparently like to call people. Who calls anyone anymore these days? I think the last time a colleague called me was about eight years ago to inform me that one of our colleagues had committed suicide. That's worthy of a call for sure. Before that I think we have to go to 2008 when a colleague called me to say that I had effed up and the service was down. Also worthy of a call. And in both of these cases they were people I worked closely with. Since email and chat became hip I have not received calls from random colleagues asking me to do something.

That aside, how big is your startup if you have to call someone? Can't you just holler over the cheap IKEA desks to the other side of the room? "Hey Susan, can you push the new version of the OrderAccept lambda?"

Anyway, I digress.

These two executives are not isolated examples. Many people in our corporate culture are glorifying startups.

Startups have a mythical status in American business folklore. When I joined a startup a few years ago people slapped me on the back with a "Good on yer" and similar signs of approval. Apparently, now I was cooking with gas! I was gonna get rich on the IPO (to be honest I hoped that too). I was gonna get stuff done. I was gonna be freed from the shackles of big bureaucracy. I was going to be out there, on the frontier of business, where small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were still real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. 

None of that turned out to be true.

Except for the small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri; they really were still small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri 🙂

Startups are not necessarily amazing. Many startups are terrible places to work and most go up in flames hopelessly. That's not just me saying that, a lot of books have been written about the topic, and there is at least one great comedy show, Silicon Valley, on the topic.

My wife and I used to watch Silicon Valley and I regularly had to convince her that the stuff depicted on that show was for realz and these were the crazy things that I ran into on a daily basis.

Many startups are a hotbed of every type of disaster imaginable. Terrible managers, inexperienced engineers, financial instability, horrible work/life balance, organizational dysfunction, bro-culture, an astonishing lack of diversity, and inexperienced dumb people making big and bad technical decisions. Of course there is a lot of that going on in big companies as well, but for one reason or another big companies are vilified for it and startups are glorified as a hotbed of innovation where geniuses work hard to create incredible amounts of value. And for sure some of them are, but I wouldn’t say that it is true of the majority.

We are romanticizing the startup in the same way we are romanticizing dating (through rom coms), admiring the lives of celebrities, and glorifying living in many times and places in our past (like the Wild West, the 1950s, and the Paleolithic). In reality, most of these things suck or sucked but they have great marketing. So does the startup.

Let's be honest: Most everything sucks and always has. If you are currently in a state of non-suckage, that is an anomaly that will undoubtedly rectify itself shortly.

Dating is mostly a hellhole of meeting crazy people that are not over their previous relationship or not yet ready for a new one. On top of that there is always fear (for people dating men) of sexual violence because, let's face it, men suck way more than the average human being.

Celebrities either lead completely boring or completely fake lives with lots of useless hangers-on and being permanently harassed by crazy fans or people who want to impress someone by killing them. 

And don't get me started about our romantic attachments to periods in the past. Until very, very recently, lives were short and miserable. Everyone lived in constant food insecurity, without decent healthcare. Your teeth were always hurting, your vision was uncorrected, a scratch from a rusty nail inevitably led to scepsis and a horrible death. Our paleolithic forebears, whose diets some misguided people are trying to replicate, spent most of their lives in unheated caves trying not to get killed while foraging for food and fending off attacks from neighboring tribes who wanted to rape all the women and kill all the men.

Anyway, I digress. again, it’s that time of the year I guess.

Working with other people inevitably exposes you to, well, not to put too fine a point on it, other people. And what was the definition of hell again? Right, other people! There is really no reason why a group of people in a smaller structure would be better, smarter, kinder, more focused, and generally better to work with than people in a bigger structure.

Obviously, size does matter for some things, but these things are not necessarily good or bad. In a smaller organization it is in theory easier to get consensus on something to do, but this is not necessarily true. It really depends on the people you actually work with and the ability of the manager or CEO to make a decision. I have seen startups that did this really well and I have seen startups that did this really badly. Mutatis mutandis, I have seen this go well in big companies and I have seen this go really badly in big companies.

It is not surprising that big companies are on the whole more bureaucratic and slower than startups. That is totally understandable and not always bad. One of the reasons why big companies are more bureaucratic is that they deal with more eventualities and often stand in a bigger spotlight. They are less able to fly under the radar of public and official attention and are expected to do well in situations where smaller companies get a get-out-of-jail for free card.

For instance article 30 of the GDPR exempts companies smaller than 250 employees from a lot of the onerous record keeping obligations that come with processing personal data. Many other laws have exemptions like that so your startup doesn’t have to bother with it. A big company on the other hand is expected to comply in an exemplary way or face huge fines and public derision.

If my startup misses payroll by a day I apologize to everyone and we're done with it. If Walmart misses payroll by a day it makes the New York Times and there are riots in the parking lots. If my startup has no accommodations for employing people who are differently abled that is probably not an issue. And so forth. Making sure that you comply with everything you need to comply with makes everything more complicated. On top of that bigger companies are often present in more states and more countries, and there is a whole lot of complexity that comes with that, which needs to be addressed by, …. processes!

There are many times when I appreciated working for a big company, mostly because I don't have to do everything myself and because there are often systems in place for every eventuality. When I indicated to my manager at Google that I wanted to move to the US, he pressed a button and a whole workflow kicked off with recruiters and immigration lawyers to make this happen. It was all precooked and thought of before by someone who knew what they were doing, which is great because I don't like being a guinea pig. 

The glorification of the startup mimics the way we romanticize the Wild West or the explorers of yore: A merry band of people trying to accomplish something great against all odds, fighting the elements and overcoming adversity by a combination of ingenuity, stamina, and grit. It completely matches the belief of many people that they were born in a log cabin that they built themselves .

Please don't get me wrong: I have a tremendous respect for small businesses and people who start startups. More often than not they take a lot of personal risk in order to try and create a valuable product or an economically viable business. My parents (small business people) always said that they'd rather be a "small boss" than a "big servant" (from Dutch: “Liever een kleine baas dan een grote knecht”) and I applaud this attitude, for without it we'd be nowhere as a civilization. For that reason I never begrudge anyone who starts a company and makes an awful lot of money in the process: Good for them! To the victor, the spoils, and all that.

But I do not see any reason to glorify the model of the startup as a better place to work than somewhere else. If, all things considered, you'd rather work in a smaller company than a larger one, that's great; there are many great small companies (including startups) to work for. If, on the other hand, you'd rather work at a big company, then that's fine too. There are terrible big companies and there are great big companies.

One is not necessarily better than the other, they are just different and both come with advantages and disadvantages. There really is no need to glorify one and vilify the other as fundamentally better.

That said, Happy Holidays everyone! Here is your Christmas Album suggestion.