How does a startup remain small and agile after it’s acquired by a larger company? How does it maintain the culture that helped get it to this point?
When Jenna Walker served as CEO and co-founder of Artifact Uprising she harkened back to the tale of David and Goliath in a message to her team.
“I once sent a team email and it said be David,” she said. “As startups stay small, what makes us great is we’re swift and we move quickly. As you get big and scale, the ability to learn how to be swift and be better in that is really all that matters.”
Walker, now the Managing Director of Techstars Sustainability Practice, told this story during a panel discussion at Denver Startup Week called Getting Big While Staying Small: Maintaining the Startup Spirit in a Big Enterprise Environment.
The panel, moderated by Tony Werner, President of Comcast Technology, Product, Xperience focused on a startup’s ability to operate small, even when it is acquired by a larger company.
“For me this is a full-time job trying to maintain the startup spirit in a large company,” Werner said. “How do you stay agile and move fast without a ton of friction when you go?”
For Zane Vella, VP Product Interactivity at Comcast, success in this area is primarily based on the team still operating on a smaller scale within the large company.
“For a software team, a lot of it comes down to keeping your own development build processes. If you have worked together as a software development team for a long time, your team will be proud of your dev-ops. Comcast has really embraced that idea of teams remaining small and nimble,” he said.
The panelists agreed that maintaining the team feel was paramount in any transition to a larger company.
“Really make sure to remember that when someone stays up to 10 p.m. to QA something, or someone is up on the weekend, to not forget to thank them for the work they’re doing,” Vella said. “So much of success comes out of that.”
When VSCO acquired Artifact Rising in 2015, Walker said the team was fearful of losing its identity.
“Will we stay connected, will we still love what we do every day, will we know how to make decisions in a large company? We were afraid of losing who we were, and who we were made Artifact Uprising so powerful,” she said.
She said the team was able to stay ahead of those issues, remaining tight-knit and continuing to think out of the box.
When it comes time to decide which offer to go with during acquisition, Catharine Balsam Schwaber of Bluprint said startups should consider the people involved.
“It really depends on the people. You have to feel that the company is going to partner with you through other humans that will help your business be successful. Obviously top dollar is good too, but in terms of real long term success, you need to feel like you’ll get true partnership from the company that acquires you,” she said.
