A short spoken excerpt from a Jason M. Lemkin YouTube talk exploring how startup founders culturally react when large companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, SAP) express interest. Lemkin contrasts two mindsets: startups that celebrate closing big-brand logos versus those that dread the extra demands (pilots, security audits) and suggests some startups are poorly suited to go up-market.
Do the founders want to go up market? Right? Do they? And I think at the end of the day, what it really comes down to, it's funny for founders. It's like when the inbound comes in, okay, when the inbound email comes in and it says Google or Facebook or SAP, does the company get excited or do they groan? You laugh. But there's a culture where people are like, when you close that Google logo, right? And Google's a big company, right, the company gets excited, you have it, you have a retreat. And oh, my God, we love Google. We love. We. You close Zoom. And there's other cultures are like, they're going to ask us to do a lot of crap. They're going to ask us to do a pilot and another audit. We just did the security audit. They're so stupid. The questions are so dumb. Right? Of course. And literally the startups that grown just, they should not go up market.
