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In the Balance: Startups: Culture or Cult?

Start ups - culture or cult?

05/11/2016 GMT

Startups: Culture or Cult?

BBC World Service - In the Balance, Startups: Culture or Cult?

Why does everyone want a piece of startup culture, and is it all it is cracked up to be?

The idea of a small, dynamic company with big ambitions and a mission that all employees believe in, seems to be something that everyone wants a slice of these days. Industrial heavyweights such as car-makers, BMW and Ford have been launching their own spin-off initiatives to try to capture that startup magic themselves. But what exactly is startup culture and how can a company hang on to it as it grows? Is it even possible for corporate giants to emulate it?  

At the London offices of Transferwise, presenter Ed Butler gets to grips with startup culture, through a game of Ping-Pong with CEO Taavet Hinrikus. It is all good fun, but how much do employees really benefit from working in environments like this one? And when does a culture, become a cult?

To explore all that and more, Ed returns to the studio where he is joined by Alicia Navarro, CEO and co-founder of the London-based tech startup, Skimlinks, and from Boston in the US by Dan Lyons, author of a recent best-selling book, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble, and Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Centre for MIT Entrepreneurship and  a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

(Photo: A man enter the doors of the WeWork co-operative co-working space in Washington, DC. Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

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