Jason M. Lemkin, a former VP at Adobe, describes how big companies keep hidden slush budgets to solve urgent problems fast. He had roughly $500k (maybe $1M today) that was use-it-or-lose-it, letting him bypass months of procurement red tape that formal contracts required.
But even I had a 500k slush budget. But you don't realize, I'll tell you how it works in big companies. Maybe you folks have worked in there. I was just a VP at Adobe for, for a little more than a year. But basically there were, you know, there were, there was unbudgeted, discretionary and budgeted. Right. You sort of know these words, but you might not see them in practice. Okay. Getting budgeted money. It was big dollars, but it was really hard. Okay? They're multimillion dollar contracts. These often would take 1, 3, 5 years of discussing and planning until you could close that deal. But then I was the most junior VP of all the VPs. But even I had a 500k slush budget. Okay? And this was a while ago, so today it might be a million bucks. Okay? And everyone had more. And what was my slush budget for my top three needs that I just couldn't get elsewhere in the organization or elsewhere budgeted through the CFO and I needed. So if you gave me. If you solve one of my three needs sitting in my corner tower office and it was some fraction of that 500k to a million, I had budget, I didn't even care. It's use it or lose it in big companies. Okay? Now I didn't have one more dollar than that. I didn't have one more dollar. And I didn't care about my eighth problem. But selfishly, if you solved one of my problems, I had half a million to a million bucks to buy. So those are the budgets you're fighting for. They haven't changed in the age of AI, but our priorities have changed. And you know, so many folks have their own problems in their own org, but they're also under pressure to bring innovation into the enterprise. But I had. It was really, really hard for me to get a million dollar piece of software and it probably would have taken me years as the new vp. Buy a million bucks in aggregate, almost a million bucks to spend on whatever I needed to get the hundreds of folks that work for me just to solve their problems. But I could, I could do that in a week or two.
