I worked at Accenture for 10 years and am on my second yC-funded company after leaving there. While I would never go back to that environment, I praise it for what it is to this day. I strongly believe more than ever you just need to understand yourself and "how you're built" and choose the environment that is most appropriate for you. And that may change over time like it did for me. But some people don't like the risks inherent in startups, or they need more structure to their day and know they don't do good with minimal direction and if that's the case, a place like Accenture is a pretty good place to work.

I wouldn't give back the skills I learned at Accenture and they've been invaluable for working on Inkling, our first B2B business. From day 1 I knew how to deal with large corporate cultures, understood the procurement process, how to manage projects, create a budget, write proposals, deal with various personalities, run a meeting and conduct workshops, conference call etiquette. It may sound simplistic, but I can't tell you the number of deals I've seen blown up simply because people don't really understand the business of business. Those skills are a lot harder to pick up in a startup.

Nope.

I've done what I'd call an "internal startup", which was successful, but with which I no longer have a great deal of involvement. I used a few hundred k of seed funding and a team of 4 to build a web app over about 4 months. It's in use at about 20 customers internationally, and is now delivered as a service model, sold internally through cross charging. i.e. we deal with internal partners and they do their own deal with the customer. I like to think it gave me a feel for some of the issues faced when doing a startup, but without many of the risks.