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Chapter 36. The Lies of Big-Company Life

For 15 years, people have been asking my advice about how to found a company. As often as not, these are brilliant folks who have had tremendous success in a big company. They’ve been promoted, they’ve managed people, and they’ve received every sort of plaudit and award. “What should I do to improve the odds of my startup succeeding?” they ask.

It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out the right answer: “Go work at someone else’s startup first.”

While big-company experience can give you some tremendous assets, it also means that you have some devastating assumptions, catastrophic habits, and terrifying gaps in your experience. What’s worse, you probably don’t know you have them. The truths that once made you successful, made you grow, made you strong—these will turn on you and twist into lies.

Trust me. I was once a big-company entrepreneur, and I was fooled by these myths as well.

Myth: Big Companies Teach Entrepreneurship

Large companies’ employees have, of late, adopted the trappings of startups. Intrapreneurs. Entrepreneurs. Founders. Startups. All terms used to refer to projects “incubated” inside Fortune 500 companies.

Of course, the term “incubated” is a misnomer. One incubates eggs. Eggs hatch and grow. Someday, the content of the egg will rival its parent. That’s not how intrapreneurship works, with one exception.¹

Internal “incubation” projects, on the other hand, are generally intended ...