Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Lerner: Internal corporate startups need P&L control and staged funding

Ely Lerner · Ely Lerner: Should Startups Hire Advisors & How much should they be paid? | E1075 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 25, 2023 · at 4:20

Ely Lerner, EIR at Reforge and former product leader at Chime and Yelp, explains how incumbent tech companies should structure internal zero-to-one product teams to succeed.

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“It's like the leader of that doesn't have P and L you're not a startup within a big company. Right. I think that is the important piece, which is like, you need to fund this as an independent unit that is looking at a business line holistically and is autonomous within the sort of like spending of that capital. Right. A startup, you should fund them a little bit at first, right? And they should come back and show progress and ask for more funds as if, you know, they're doing their C, they're doing their A, right? Like that's how you should do that because that's the only way you really like succeed at those hard problems.”

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