Category: business advice

One of the fascinating phenomenons of the modern era is how corporate managers have appropriated the startup culture.

At the announcement of the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation’s Apps For Broadband prizes, Foxtel’s CIO Robyn Elliot described her experience of working in a startup.

“Foxtel was once in the category of startup itself,” said Elliot at the start of her speech.

Apples and Oranges

Comparing Foxtel to a scrabbling startup in the modern sense is bizarre given the company was a well funded joint venture between News Limited and Telstra – the company being a good example of modern Australian crony corporatism rather than a risky undertaking by daring entrepreneurs.

This conceit about startups isn’t unusual among corporate executives, in the early days of Australia’s National Broadband Network it was quite common to hear NBNCo managers talk about their startup ethos – this from a company backed by around 30 billion dollars of government funding.

At one stage I interviewed for a job at NBNCo and I struggled not to start giggling when the “startup ethos of the organisation” was earnestly emphasised to me several times during the meeting.

Not surprisingly the job went to an ex-telco staffer, as did most of the team’s roles. No doubt their corporate experience was far more suited to the company’s ‘startup ethos’  than that of actually having worked in four startups. Giggling in the interview probably didn’t help either.

The romantic dreams of executives

Given most corporate staffers would curl into the fetal position and weep after two weeks of working in a real startup, why do executives indulge in the conceit that their business is ‘just like a startup’?

The answer could lie in “The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse in Money Values” written by John Maynard Keynes in 1931.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men.

So it is for the modern corporate executive who has spent their working lives fighting for the corner office having met their KPIs and spending years cultivating their network of like minded managers.

After two decades spent writing stern memos on the use of paper clips and climbing the corporate ladder, it must be tempting for a middle aged executive to look at those funky youngsters getting billion dollar payouts after a couple of years grabbing three hours sleep a night among the pizza boxes under the desk and get pangs of what might have been…..

A harmless startup fantasy

In some many ways the executive startup fantasy is touching and largely harmless, even if it does attract sniggers and giggles from the unwashed and underpaid who’ve actually been there.

The real risk is when a senior executive tries to shoehorn a Silicon Valley startup culture into an organisation.

While most large companies could do with some of the hunger and flexibility found in smaller businesses, there’s many ways that could go terribly wrong – particularly when driven by a starry eyed romantic manager.

For most executives though, the dreams of being in a startup will remain a fantasy – and that’s probably best for everybody.

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• A startup’s journey – what businesses can and can’t learn from Silicon Valley
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• When Venture Capital meets its own disruption
• Australia’s entrepreneurial opportunity
• Are Australians too risk adverse for startups?