There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”
When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like.<p>The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock. What we did moved very little of the top revenue metric. It made little difference if I worked like a dog, or slacked. The promos were very much “buddy buddy” system.<p>In the end I realized you can’t have startups in big companies (esp as an engineer you don’t have the huge upside  if the startup is successful, your upside is capped)<p>Startups work because you have skin in the game, when you build something people want, you get to reap rewards proportional to it. That correlation and feedback loop is very important.<p>At big companies you don’t have the the same correlation. Some big shot exec they hired reaps far far more on the work you did.<p>Equity is what builds wealth.