It’s much easier operating in a startup in the early days.
The team is working in a messy, complicated space where there are no right answers and you have the freedom to explore the problem-situation and create solutions that wrap around a customer.
As you get bigger, this gets harder to do.
In large corporate organisations you come under pressure from people in roles that are more about risk reduction than value creation.
You’ve created the value in the earlier stages, now the challenge is to keep that value.
The pressure often ends up squeezing some people into a box – perhaps squeezing others out altogether.
It’s probably inevitable that as a company gets bigger it focuses more on internal power dynamics than customers.
More companies go under, I remember reading, because of internal problems than because of competitors or customer behaviour.
Handcrafted insight 