Morrie the Toupee Salesman

I hang out online a lot at Hacker News. The discussion there is mostly about entrepreneurship and technology, areas I’ve been passionate about ever since I took Entrepreneurship from “Sideshow” Bob Blunden at Dalhousie Business School. In general the attitude towards big companies is disdain – big companies have endless committees, and meetings, and meetings about committees, and stultifying, pointless bureaucracy. What a lot of people don’t realize is that when you take funding from a VC, you’re essentially creating an environment that fosters the exact same thing – the phrase often used is “imitating the company you want to grow up to be.” So you may be a 15 person company, but the next thing you know you’ll end up with executives whose most recent relevant experience is from much larger companies, and they probably came to your company to build an empire, not a product. Before you can say “Series C” you’ll end up with 80 employees, and product development cycles resembling Chrysler’s from 1952.

And sometimes you can create the startup mentality within a large organization. These efforts often have names like “Skunk Works” or “xxx labs” or “research center.” There are real challenges to leading such a group successfully – groups that don’t have direct ties to profits risk being starved during lean times, and even in the best of times major decisions are made without any consideration of the effects on that group. But all it takes is one successful product launch, and things change instantly – it’s very much like the startup process, where each obstacle is actually a step upwards, but immediately followed by another larger obstacle. You have to build momentum in the exact same way. That’s been my challenge at travelpod labs. We hope to take a step upwards very soon, but fully realize that if we do, there will be another hill to climb right behind it.

Oh, and Bob – you were a great teacher.