Big Company, Small Company

Last updated: November 10, 2025

For much of my career, I worked at small startups. Recently, I joined a big company. I didn't expect it to change how I think about work, but it has.

At startups you have a kind of freedom that's almost impossible to replicate anywhere else. It comes from necessity. There isn't a "mobile platform team," a "data pipeline team," a "launch readiness gate," or a "brand team". There's just you, and whoever's sitting next to you, trying to figure out how to get people to use the thing you built. Nobody asks you for permission because there's no one to ask. You decide what matters, you decide when it ships, and you live with whatever happens.

You aren't managing scope, you're managing survival.

The strange part is that this freedom doesn't necessarily lead to large results. You could have a strong insight, work incredibly hard, and still launch something to six users. If two of them don't like it, there goes 30% of your active user base. Startups are exciting largely because the variance is so high. You could build something that nobody cares about. You could also build something that changes the world. These possibilities sit right next to each other, and you feel that every day.

Big companies are different. You don't own the whole product anymore. You own a part of it - a slice, a pixel. But that pixel will be seen by millions of people. Sometimes millions in a single afternoon. There's something humbling about that. At startups I could change everything, but those changes affected only a few people. At a big company I change almost nothing, but when it moves, it moves the needle.

You trade autonomy for scale.

I used to think the trade wasn't worth it. Now I'm not so sure.

Another difference is the distribution of outcomes. In startups, you can fail spectacularly. I've seen entire companies disappear overnight because one number on a fundraising slide didn't go the right direction. I've also seen products go from zero to ten thousand users in a weekend. It's emotionally violent. You spend a lot of time oscillating between delusion and despair.

At a big company, the highs and lows are capped. You rarely launch something that is catastrophic or transcendent. Most things fall somewhere between "pretty good" and "not so good." That can feel limiting, but it also means your career becomes less of a gamble. Your resume gets better even if the product doesn't change the world.

The same ceiling applies to people.

At startups, you encounter some of the best engineers you'll ever meet. They move effortlessly between architecture, design, and product thinking. They don't ask "what do you want?" They ask "why does it matter?" Some of them think so far ahead that you feel like you're watching someone 4D play chess.

You also encounter the worst engineers you'll ever meet. People who couldn't get a job anywhere else, who are willing to exchange stability for equity that may never exist. Startups compress the talent curve. You get the brilliant and the hopeless. Very little in the middle.

Big companies have a higher floor. Fewer geniuses, fewer disasters. You don't see as many miracles, but you also don't see as many train wrecks.

After enough time in startups, you develop a strange instinct. You start to recognize who is adding value and who isn't. It's not emotional - more like a survival reflex. When you've lived through enough layoffs, you start to see people the way a founder might: if the company had to shrink to five people tomorrow, who would still be here?

That awareness makes you sharper, but also more savage. Startups reward urgency, intensity, and optimization. Big companies reward alignment, collaboration, and patience. Both value creation, but they operate in different timescales. Startups are about combustion. Big companies are about inertia.

If there's anything I've learned from stepping from one world into the other, it's that neither environment has a monopoly on meaning. Startups teach you to build from zero. Big companies teach you to build for scale. If you're lucky, you learn both.

Startups give you the steering wheel.

Big companies give you the highway.

The trick is knowing what you're learning at each stage - and when it's time to trade one for the other.