Tech, Startups, Capital, Ideas.

Yesterday I met with an experienced executive who had recently left a large and successful local software company. He had spent his entire career at three large companies in succession and was now looking to do something early or mid-stage. He asked me what to expect.

Frankly it’s been so long since I worked at a large, established company that I almost forgot how challenging it can be to make the transition. He had been out networking with a few other VC’s and had received the common wisdom: he should truly expect to get his hands dirty – a lot of the infrastructure one comes to take for granted at the big corporation simply does not exist at the small one.

I certainly support this feedback, although I will say from first-hand experience that asking what it’s like to go from a big company to a small one is a bit like asking someone what a bungee jump is going to feel like – ask all you want but there’s just no substitute for experiencing the real thing.

What is really different at a startup is what I call cycle time. If you remember the days when Intel used to make a big deal about the clock speed of its processors (yes, I’m dating myself – this was in the days when increasing clock speed was still possible, before adding more cores became the answer), startups are just that. At a startup you have to act fast. Very, very, very fast. The best startups are running at ultra-high clock speeds.

Coming from a big company, cycle time at a startup is unbelievable – a question is asked and the next minute someone has run an experiment and has an answer to the question. This is probably the single biggest challenge for an executive transitioning from big company to small.

Yes, infrastructure can be challenging at times, but in today’s world you need little more than a wireless router and an Internet connection to do your work. No need to setup cumbersome servers, run lots of wires, configure email, or deal with all the other tedium that used to be involved in setting up a company. Google Mail, Amazon Web Services, and you’re good to go. Small, nimble teams can work just about anywhere as long as they have high-speed Internet connectivity. After all, just about every enterprise or consumer facing web application is now hosted in the cloud.

But for the experienced executive, adjusting to a startup’s dramatically faster clock speed is no easy feat. After spending years presenting to senior management, asking permission to act, and preserving legacy revenue streams, the switch is often a difficult one. There’s typically no upside in coming in guns a blazing, but conversely, being too cautious at a startup is actually much riskier than taking more risk.

Those startups that cross the chasm and grow into big companies face a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts once they’re wildly successful – defending their legacy revenue streams quickly becomes a higher priority than aggressively creating new ones. Startups, conversely, are all about running offense, and running it fast. Really fast.

So my advice for the executive leaving the big company and going to a startup is this: if it doesn’t feel like the processor is about to overheat, you’re not yet running fast enough.