“Impact” is a key term used by both startups and big companies to attract talent. Both claim that joining them would be the best way to “changing the world”. But “impact” and “changing the world” can mean two very different things: setting direction, or creating value.
In a startup, you have heavy influence on the direction of the company and thus how society as a whole allocates resources. If you’re the founder or the CEO, the idea is yours and you’re setting the direction. However, the amount of actual value created per person is not yet certain.
In a large, established company, the company’s activity is known to be something with a high yield, one that creates a lot of value for society. As an employee, while you did not set the direction, you’re doing something that guarantees the creation of value.
Both of these influence the world. The former is important because it can further society in new and previously unthought of ways, even though there is little guarantee of success. The latter is important because it is where value is actually created, even though there is little room for innovation.
So who is changing the world more? The Microsoft or Google employee whose code is routinely rolled out to hundreds of millions of people, or the founders of startups creating new and exciting yet-to-be-released products?
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Interesting though but I think a better way to think about it is impact over time.
ReplyDeleteWhen you join an established coy, your impact over time is unlikely to grow. It will remain stable or decrease over time as the coy loads up on more talent. And you are for the most part disposable - another cog in the wheel. I don't know if one can equate that vision of impact with one where you are a founder/early employee at a startup that looks like its on a growth trajectory.
In my opinion big companies "changing the world" is all snake oil. The world has already changed because of them. That's why they are big.
Interesting demarcation. When I hear people use impact as their motivation, implicit in their choice of words is the concept of agency. Without that concept embedded in, it is hard to argue that being a garbage collector is not "high-impact".
ReplyDeleteInteresting. "Impact over time" is an interesting way to look at what impact means.
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned "replacability" as something related to impact, and I wonder if 'replacability' and 'impact' are same, related or distinct concepts. I would argue that these are distinct because it is conceivable to have high-replacability and low-impact (McDonald cashier maybe?), low replacability and high impact (Steve Jobs), low-replacability and low-impact (founder of a specialized startup that doesn't take off) and high-replacability and high-impact (teachers, perhaps?).The other argument you make is that the world has already "changed" because of large companies, and that their largeness is attribution to the "change" having already occurred. But isn't following through with the original idea "changing the world" as well? We in the startup community emphasize execution over ideas, and large companies have reached the "execution" stage to just keep doing what they found to work. Isn't there importance in that, enough importance for it to be considered "impactful"?You and I are both founders of startups and I agree that this isn't the kind of "impact" that we find exciting. Although judging by your definition, it seems that when looking at impact over time, being an executive at a large company would have the highest "impact" (consistently high impact over long period of time). Founding a startup is one way to get there. (Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of other motivations to founding a startup!)
I suppose that's true, and that there are two different things here (or maybe I'm not understanding the concept of "agency" well enough):
ReplyDelete#1 is the ability for people to make decisions on the job. Jobs is typically thought of as "high impact" provides greater amount of freedom to make decisions (rather than having those decisions imposed on them).
#2 is what is at stake -- a "high impact" position is typically one where the difference between "doing well" and "doing badly" is very large, and that a single mistake can affect millions of people. (Think President of the United States?)
Both being a startup founder and an engineer at Google can get you #2 (and to a lesser extent, #1), but in very different ways.