At the Fortune Brainstorm:Tech conference in Pasadena, Calif., on July 22, 2009, one of the lighter moments came when Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen spoke on stage about “one of the defining experiences of my career” when he spent 9 months as an intern at IBM in 1990-91 when it had 400,000 employees. He used a program in the office that determined the number of layers of management between him and the CEO was 17, “from which I concluded that it was unlikely I would make a career at IBM. … It was essentially like working for the Soviet Union at the time.”
He had a great experience at IBM, but that serves as his internal reference for big companies. In this three-minute segment, recorded with a Flip Ultra HD recorder, he compares the culture of small and large companies and concludes, “Startups are where a lot of innovation happens. … But you have to get big to have a big impact. I’ve always thought an entrepreneur needs to think in terms of getting to a large size in scale in order to have a big impact.”
Watch or embed the video on Blip.tv
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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