Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jokethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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> ... what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?

No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control.

So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model.

So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results.

You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.

Then what's your incentive to work at the company instead of starting the project externally? If the product is a sustainable business model in isolation, surely it's sustainable without the external resources.

Starting a business is a lot of work and risk. Having those removed makes the path so much easier to experiment and removes all the friction.

Indeed, which is the point of the original comment: that large companies bias towards those people who don't want that risk.

Some companies do something like this with some success, but this was also the theory of the guy who drove Sears into the ground.

The guy who drove Sears into the ground also did the classic private-equity self-dealing to carve off all the valuable bits and saddle the company with debt. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of a company that owns lots of businesses which are mostly independent

I’d theorize it has something to do with whether the separation actually makes sense. Berkshire Hathaway owns separate businesses that have zero to do with each other and may spin off or bring in new ones anytime. Sears had different departments of the same store trying to beggar each other which is counterproductive.

This is a good way to be biased towards the most lucky and the most cutthroat. Also, why would the best talent look to work for you if they have to take so much personal risk without the possibility of the upside of stock options of a startup?

Gonna be awfully hard to comply with all the consent decrees and regulatory scrutiny with zero bureaucracy.

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