@caljreich As someone who has worked at a start-up, consulting, and 2 multi-national companies. I have my personal take on this.
I think a lot of start-ups are technologically much more than ancient industries. As someone mentioned before, if you shadow a CEO on a multinational company, you'll come up with your own long list of problems to solve.
I'll give you one im currently working on, which amazes me to this day.
2 of the multinational companies I worked at, my departmental revenue exceeds 15 million usd (a team of 20 people), and both of them had their entire databases on several scattered Excel sheets. The start-up I worked at had several engineers manage the backend, and the revenue of that company wasn't even 5 million of the entire company. I had a call with the US lead engineer telling them my frustrations, and they shared the fact that they had started to fix their database issues just last year, and most of the team were working off of excel.
(To be very honest, this still amazes me how a multi-billion dollar revenue company still operates on millions of Excel sheets)
What I'm saying is, the moment you actually look at very large/ancient industries, you start asking yourself, how on earth are they actually functional? Their process sucks so bad.
However, getting to these companies to sell your product isn't exactly easy.
The start-up world needs a combination of great salesmen and product managers to truly understand the problems these companies are struggling with.
We will all say shit about workday (and I absolutely hate it with every cell in by body), but the reason they are doing okay is because they have a great relationship with MNCs.
I think a lot of start-ups are technologically much more than ancient industries. As someone mentioned before, if you shadow a CEO on a multinational company, you'll come up with your own long list of problems to solve.
I'll give you one im currently working on, which amazes me to this day.
2 of the multinational companies I worked at, my departmental revenue exceeds 15 million usd (a team of 20 people), and both of them had their entire databases on several scattered Excel sheets. The start-up I worked at had several engineers manage the backend, and the revenue of that company wasn't even 5 million of the entire company. I had a call with the US lead engineer telling them my frustrations, and they shared the fact that they had started to fix their database issues just last year, and most of the team were working off of excel.
(To be very honest, this still amazes me how a multi-billion dollar revenue company still operates on millions of Excel sheets)
What I'm saying is, the moment you actually look at very large/ancient industries, you start asking yourself, how on earth are they actually functional? Their process sucks so bad.
However, getting to these companies to sell your product isn't exactly easy.
The start-up world needs a combination of great salesmen and product managers to truly understand the problems these companies are struggling with.
We will all say shit about workday (and I absolutely hate it with every cell in by body), but the reason they are doing okay is because they have a great relationship with MNCs.