Last May 11 to 13, 2012, Cebu held its first Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend Cebu was a 54-hour event (started at Friday 6pm and ended around Sunday 8pm) that's designed around the maxim, "No talk, all action. Launch a startup in 54 hours." Although all kinds of startups or business can be built on startup weekends, due to the nature of most attendees majority of the startup ideas that would flourish are those that are tech-related: mobile applications, websites or web applications, stand-alone PC applications.

The people that came to participate, all 200+ that paid the Php1,000 registration fee, are mostly developers (or programmers, if you still like that term) and designers.

There are also a few business-types who showed up, and for good measure. These guys' skillsets, unlike developers and designers, are hard to define.

Unlike developers where you can bunch them based on their technical skills (Objective C+, Java, CSS... if you consider that a computing language), business-types do not have targeted skill sets. What they have are years of experience in what I'd like to call as "life skills." Sure, there are business certifications like Six Sigma, Lean and the like. But if you think about it, those certifications don't amount much to actual product building but instead they are more on process efficiencies.

I could go on and on and not make a very good picture of what business-types are about but just take it from me: these guys' skills are difficult to categorize.

Why am I babbling about this?

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When a new startup comes into an established company, the first wall it typically hits is CorpDev, or corporate development: the group within a business that manages change. CorpDev is usually charged with planning corporate strategy—where a business will grow or shrink, the markets it will enter or exit, and what kind of contracts and deals it may strike with other companies. It often oversees acquisitions. It plans them. Approves them. And then it sets the terms.

When a big company gobbles up a smaller one, often only a fraction of the money is handed over up front. The rest comes later, based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the road. It's similar to how incentives are built into the contracts of professional athletes, except with engineering benchmarks instead of home runs.

Corpdev sets these milestones. They reflect the reason for the acquisition, and how the company—in Flickr's case, Yahoo—can leverage them. They're baked into the deal, and an acquisition integration team begins working immediately to make sure they are met. Typically, they're very engineering-based, designed to integrate the smaller company's product into the enormous corporate machine.

And because payment schedules are based on achieving those CorpDev terms, it means both companies have a vested (pun intended) interest in putting those milestones ahead of new features. They are a sledgehammer applied with great force to the feet of nimble development. Worse, they often completely ignore what made the smaller target valuable in the first place.