Startups are no Bugs
I really love the word “bug” — I am Austrian, my mothertongue is German, and I learned the word “bug” in the context of a computer problem and later on I realized that this is also the word for insects.
The last thirteen years I worked with many entrepreneurs on their business ideas, incorporated together with them startups both in Europe and Silicon Valley under the brand 42Angelitos, tried to find out critical success factors for the growth and success of startups, learned a lot with trials and errors.
It changed my way of thinking and acting and it also changed me as a person.
Because of new innovative, technological solutions and new demands from customers many corporates now realize that they might get enormous problems in near future if they stick to their old-fashioned but still commercial valid business models. Therefore corporates think about innovation and digitalization and change and some other buzz words.
And it is obvious that they also think about startups.
Many of the corporates nowadays start with startups and most of them are thinking and acting like startups are bugs.
They just collect startups like bugs, so, they consequently kill them just in order to show the collection to the public, to the employees, to the shareholders, to the press, to the competition. They believe that showing a collection is the proof of being innovative and ready for the future.
They also believe that startups are bugs in the existing ecosystem like software bugs in programs. They are not working with them or for them. They are not learning from them. They are not accepting them.
They are working against them.
They moderate senseless discussions with obscure experts.
They orchestrate startup competition events with members in the jury with no entrepreneurial background.
They initiate hackathons where startups deliver solutions in one day whereas their own people are not able or willing or allowed to do the same in a year with tons of money.
They give the winning startup some money like feeding animals in the zoo.
Corporates just do not want to change their existing status and power because this also would mean that they have to change personal lives of everybody in the corporate.
Changing behavior on a personal level is hard to do, I know. It means that you have to take risk on a personal level and it means that you have to leave your comfort zone.
But if you as a person do it, you understand that startups are no bugs!
