Big hammer or small hammer?

I was talking to a friend the other day about startup vs big company life and he used an analogy so good I’m going to steal it (and expand upon it).

If you think about the problem you are trying to solve as a rock, and the business you are in that is trying to solve as a hammer with which to chisel or otherwise transform said rock, you can choose a brick hammer (which is a small hammer) or a sledge hammer (a large, heavy hammer), or anything in between.

The smaller the hammer, the more effort you have to put into the swing. However, it’s fairly easy to pick up, to manipulate and to re-orient if you decide you need to approach the rock from a different viewpoint.

If you, on the other hand, choose the sledgehammer, then when you swing you are wielding a lot of force. It becomes easier to make progress on your initial approach, but if you need to switch up your emphasis, it’s going to take some time, because of the weight of the hammer.

The larger the business, the more leverage and power you have to attack a single problem. I’ve worked at large companies in the past, and I can tell you the size and scope of problems they were able to work on, often in parallel, were amazing. However, there was a lot of time and effort spent on coordinating those efforts, and and a lot of bureaucracy and red tape if there was a process improvement needed. (There was also dead weight at some of these companies.)

At a smaller company or a startup, as I’ve worked at in the past, I didn’t have the bandwidth to take on multiple large projects. Doing more than one or two major projects was a recipe for distraction and impotence. However, when focusing on one effort, it was easy to try different approaches, work really hard and be super flexible when incorporating feedback from customers and iterating.

There are strengths in both the small and big hammer approaches. The important thing is to choose what is a good fit for both the problem you are trying to solve and your working style (which may change over time).