What’s the difference between working for a startup and working for a huge corporation? Everything is different.
Table of Contents
The Startup Mentality
At a startup, the only thing that matters is product-market fit. There’s no time for process. You don’t have time for performance reviews.
None of that matters if your startup isn’t making money and growing. It’s all about speed, talking to customers, and “build, build, build, sell, sell, sell.”
You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.
Traits of Successful Founders
The best founders I’ve worked with share these traits.
They’re relentless builders, they love talking to customers firsthand, and they can sell—they can “sell sand to Hawaii.”
The Corporate Advantage
In contrast, at a big-name company, the name itself is leverage.
At Amazon, almost everyone will take your call. At a startup, it’s more like, “Who are you and why do I need to waste 15 minutes?”
At a big company, you’re working with extremely talented people, so the internal network is incredibly powerful.
Especially at a company like Amazon with so many different business units, you can find a team, business, and product that you truly connect with.
Operational Excellence at Scale
The operational process at Amazon was A+. The way they conduct interviews, the bar-raising program, the writing culture, and how they run meetings—it was all exceptional.
What I particularly appreciated at Amazon is that there’s no room for false harmony. Your job in meetings is to truth-seek and to find what’s best for customers and the business.
That means there’s a lot of heated discussion and hotly debated topics, but I love that because what I hate is sweeping things under the rug where nothing ever gets done. Builders hate that.
Leadership Lessons from Giants
At Amazon and other big corporations, I witnessed what strong leadership looks like from a people’s inspiration and motivation standpoint—how to inspire large groups of people to move big mountains together.