> <i>culture- a bit informal, and yet hyper-productive; personal, and yet respectful; transparent and quite flat and approachable</i><p>This is a very rosy view of startup culture. I've rarely encountered a culture like this in 20 years of building and consulting for startups.<p>In fact, startups are often the least transparent organizations because they have no legal obligation to publish financial information.<p>> <i>What I don't get it is that why would startups with <10-15 employees and over years in operation would want to behave like a BIG company. I have encountered startups where there would be management, useless meeting, artificial hierarchy, etc.</i><p>This happens for lots of reasons. Here are a few:<p>(0. Many of these things -- management, meetings, hierarchies -- are not <i>categorically</i> useless. They're tools that can be misused.)<p>1. People with big-company backgrounds join the team and reproduce what they find familiar.<p>2. Structure, predictability, and repeatability become increasingly important as a startup scales. People address this by defining processes, which may be inefficient (or may not -- it depends on how good the managers are).<p>3. When managers don't know how to solve a problem, they look at how other companies solved it. Sometimes they get it wrong. Agile is a great example: at one point, it helped a few companies, and then everyone adopted it without understanding how/why to adapt it to their own purposes. This resulted in lots of waste and a backlash against Agile.<p>4. Investors sometimes become armchair managers and will push startup leadership to build these processes.<p>5. Employees demand them. A lot of people do not enjoy flat hierarchies, 100% autonomous (meeting-less) work, or having no title. Titles in particular can be as valuable to people as a big raise in salary.