Startup vs. Established Company – Which One Is Best for Your Career?

The headlines nowadays are full of stories about hot new companies generating exciting new products and services. What many of these companies fail to do is generate a profit – yet.

Startups are sprouting like spring flowers nowadays, promising a fresh approach to old ways of doing things. Blue Apron, Casper, DoorDash, Lime, Lyft, Peloton, Uber, Wag, WeWork – each one is revolutionizing their industry and losing money doing it as they burn through the cash provided by venture capitalists. Time will tell which startup will thrive. (For the record, we are rooting for all these companies.)

If you are in the job market, the question often becomes whether the excitement of working for a startup, with all its risk, exceeds the benefits of a profitable, stable, established company. But that analysis overlooks what a smart established company can offer – what we like to call “intrapreneurialism,” or innovation within an established company.

This is not a new idea – it was pioneered by the late Dr. Edward Shils, a Wharton management professor who served as an adviser to Henry Schein, Inc. – but it’s one gaining traction as people come to grips with the risks inherent in a startup. Please don’t read this as a knock on startups – a large number of companies you may have heard of were once fledgling enterprises, such as Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and Walmart. Every new company starts small.

Many of these big companies got that way through intrapreneurialism. Steve Jobs has described the development of the Macintosh computer as an example of the approach. Not a bad little success story, right?

But it seems to me something different is happening now. The explosion of digital technology is allowing would-be entrepreneurs to turn ideas into businesses more rapidly than ever before, and perhaps without the structure and processes required to make businesses succeed.

Here’s where smart, established companies come in. They unleash “intrapreneurs” within their organization to create startups, thereby providing an outlet for entrepreneurial energy alongside the support structure needed to get a business off the ground.

At Henry Schein, which itself began as a startup in 1932, we’ve had success practicing this approach long before it was fashionable. In the 1970s, for example, we published the first dental supply catalog with actual prices backed by products in stock, and in the 1980s, we were an early pioneer in bringing to market generic drugs. In the early 1990s, we helped advance the use of personal computers in dental practices as well as the first dental practice management software, followed by digital dental clinical records. In 1999, we created Henry Schein Financial Services to help our customers access the financing they needed to purchase capital equipment. More recently, we created a Global Innovation Center, which scours the market for new products and services that we help to commercialize.

The bottom line is that being an entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily require someone to take extraordinary risk, even as we applaud and admire the determination and desire of those who do. Sometimes, the best risk is to innovate from within.