Some
former employees of Yahoo, Google and Facebook recently announced
they’ve spawned a startup, called Cloudera, to provide support for Hadoop, an open source development platform for building applications to process large volumes of data.
This is not the first time ex-employees of well-known companies have formed startups. (Earlier this year, search engine Cuil
was built by ex-Google staff). Actually, employees of companies that
are known and not-so-known leave to start their own businesses all the
time – that’s part of the startup culture – but it doesn’t always make
the news.
But
does association with a successful company make the news because the
media seeks out and hones in on these eyebrow-raising tidbits of
information, or is it part of a well-engineered marketing strategy by
the startup?
Spawning
a new company is by no means a picnic, and if the founders have some
claim to fame, then it’s not a bad idea to capitalize on it. But it’s
at once a blessing and a curse. If potential customers perceive a
former employee of a successful company as having the ability to
somehow transfer that success to the startup, then that’s a good thing.
But what’s not so good is the definite expectation of success by virtue
of the connection.
Moreover,
the startup will probably endure a frustrating lifetime of comparison
with every instance of success and failure explained in relation to the
company that once employed the founders.
But
so far, the ex-Yahoo, Google and Facebook employees behind Cloudera are
off to a good start. They’ve shown their mental brawn by getting in on
the business of helping customers manage the reams of data they
produce. Recognizing that particular market as fruitful is a good move
given the trend towards explosive amounts of corporate data and the
need to somehow control it.
But
the journey has only just begun for these ex-staff of these famous
companies. And, they will no doubt at times come to love their former
association as much as they’ll despise it.
