I love the opening anecdote to Paul Graham’s The Power of the Marginal:
A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he’d been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. “Those guys must have been freezing!”That’s one of California’s hidden advantages: the mild climate means there’s lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There’s a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned — by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself — get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can’t just tinker. You have to justify.
Graham goes through a list of advantages to being an outsider rather than an insider. One “advantage” to being an outsider is that becoming an insider often involves an “anti-test” — “filtering out the people it should select by making them to do things only the wrong people would do”:
For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people could spare. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it’s hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the corporate ladder at General Electric — or Microsoft, actually.
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I think that’s one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don’t realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.
Read the whole essay.