Brad Feld

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Passive-Aggressive Behavior Is Useless In A Startup

Jul 09, 2007

If you are making the move from a big company to a startup, Scott Converse has a must read post up about passive-aggressive behavior titled Corporate vs. Startup behaviors.

I can’t stand passive-aggressive behavior, especially in a startup context.  I’d much prefer a good argument.  The value of being direct is extremely high, especially when faced with the amount of ambiguity that exists in a startup.

I’ve never really worked for a large company (even my time at AmeriData was really more of a big startup since it was growing so fast and doing so many acquisitions) so I’ve never really learned (or experienced) how to survive in a big company.  Nor do I really care since I doubt I’ll ever be in that environment.  However, I do care about how to map big company experience to entrepreneurial experience and Scott provides some very useful insights in his post.