Your browser does not support the audio element.Start-ups can be fun; medium-sized companies suit fast learners; multinationals are well resourced, but their internal processes can be hard to navigate.
We've heard it in this series, and in previous ones, and probably will again in future ones on this podcast, too. There are cultural differences between working in industry and working in academia. If you're a leading professor and you phone up a major company in your space and say, “I'm interested in talking to someone,” chances are somebody will get back to you.
Being in a mid-sized company, that was a great entry point into industry for me. So the first company I joined at the time had about 200 employees and I came in at quite a high level. So trying to navigate your way through processes and through quite opaque power structures… because every organization has power structures, some of which are explicit, and the organagrams and so on, and some of which are not.