> > Most smart people are actually terrible at having the drive/follow through to take things to completion. They’ll usually want to give up at the first sign of failure or slowness.

Also, sometimes these people who don't follow through to take things to completion might "just" have something like ADHD. Struggling with finishing tasks is a very common ADHD symptom, and a good manager will help someone use the other "good" skills to compensate for such an issue. (Personally I believe the reason for this is perfectionism.)

The idea of low friction and similar environments and someone being productive always trigger me a little. In the sense that I think MANY people get a lot of things done in a low friction environment... BECAUSE it is a low friction environment. And once you have a few people who have to deal with the results that come out of nowhere, that other person is the friction for everyone else.

I've worked a lot of places where there's that special someone who gets to cowboy everything because they're "really good" and of course they look really good, because the rules or structure don't apply to them and they can move faster than anyone else by design. It's a never ending cycle.

Meanwhile everyone else or people who come later have to deal with everything the special someone did / didn't think of and so on.

I don't disagree with the premise, but there's consequences and a sort of inescapable feedback loop sometimes too.

What makes you think a startup is a low-friction environment rather than a different kind of high-friction environment where the corporate person could be absolutely miserable and unprepared for execution with resource constraints?

> the corporate person could be absolutely miserable and unprepared for execution with resource constraints?

This is possible and even likely depending on how you hire.

But I think the OP might be assuming you can onboard whomever you've hired and instead referring to the relative incentives in each environment. For example, big companies tend to plan quarter to quarter, while small companies typically have a pile of things they need done urgently and are incentivized to help folks move as fast as possible (company runway may only be 1 year). That sets up a dynamic where large companies make you spend time derisking new project proposals and getting buy-in, in a way that small companies don't (this is where the agility comes from). Bigco also may have higher standards for getting something off the ground and a lower tolerance for code that is likely to be thrown away, whereas at startups you often write a pile of not-so-great code just to prove the thing works + understand your customer, with the knowledge that you'll have to throw it away when it's time to grow and scale.

One more annoying wrinkle: big companies sometimes have investments that mean you can't use the best tool for the best job. At Google you have to use borg and a very annoying deep stack of stuff to expose a service to the public -- you can't just buy a domain and spin up your website on a $10/mo server with nginx. You can't use React. You can't use PyTorch and just fork the hottest new model that came out -- you'll have to translate it into Tensorflow or JAX first. You also have to build using tools that assume and can handle scale, but sacrifice agility and developer ergonomics for that.

Oh one more thing: people at big companies are so obsessed with level. If you have good ideas and want to try them out but you're underleveled, you're going to have an impossible time geting buy-in from leadership to let you lead or even try the thing. At small companies if you have an idea that's good for the company, it's obvious to your leadership and they're just like go do it, you're in charge of this project, show me what can happen in a week. And you can make stuff happen. Low friction. Big companies might also have an entire team of PMs trying to decide what to prioritize (all the while playing political games since it affects their standing in the company), who also have to sync with eng and design, and then some pushback between the two happen. At small companies the number of people to get on board is just smaller and it makes things go faster.

It's the difference between being blocked by a wall (with 'no trespassing' sign) and being blocked by a muddy field. Some people find the former more stressful; some the latter.

Sometimes I feel like I'm staring at a wall in the middle of a muddy field...

Which one is which in this metaphor? Or is it just that they're different? My guess is that the wall is the startup, but I'm not quite sure.

I was thinking the wall is the corporate process and departmental silos, turf wars etc. Startup is the muddy field where you have no support, but nobody in your way.

Startups have just as much friction. The only difference is that the friction is more external than internal.