It didn't take too long before my experience working at Zane Benefits caused me to realize that I absolutely can't work at a large company ever again.  I love the start-up environment.  I love the responsibility and the risk and the sense of urgency.  When I'm done here, I'll be deciding between starting something on my own (possibly with other people) or joining a new start-up.

I get the feeling that this blog is going to turn into nothing more than links to the 37Signals blog.  They say everything I want to say but they actually know what they're talking about.  They posted a couple weeks ago about how underdogs should take more chances.  I couldn't agree more.  Particularly, I liked this section:

That's a really great way to phrase a good chunk of what I've learned so far at work.  Like any company, we've had some missteps.  Almost all of the mistakes we made were our misguided attempt to do what was normal.  Now we're doing things a different way.  More and more we are trying to innovate and take advantage of our agility.  So far it's paying off big time.

I look at this as an opportunity rather than a burden.  It's not that start-ups have to take more risk, it's that we get to.  We get to try things that no one else is willing to do and it ends up being really exciting.  The health benefits industry is a great field in which to be the little guy because the big guys seem so completely unwilling to change what they've been doing for the past 50 years.

It seems like a lot of time in business school is spent learning about what people before you did in the hopes that you can copy them when you enter the business world.  I'm certainly not going to say that learning from the past isn't worthwhile, but it would be so boring to think that your career success depends on how well you can follow the rules set by your predecessors.  Following rules is easy.  I want to make up new rules.

I think that I'm finding a pretty nice balance between tradition and innovation.  I'm heavily influenced by the way things are done at tech companies (rapid deployment, radical ideas, not too formal) but I also have to cater to people that are used to a very, very old school health benefits model.  This gives me the freedom to try new things while keeping me grounded enough that I don't do anything too risky.

Paul (our founder) says when writing his first book, he learned that you want to be cutting edge but not bleeding edge.  Bleeding edge, he claims, means you're the first one to do something.  Cutting edge means that you're among the first.  I try to keep this in mind when deciding if our customers are ready for a new UI decision or technical feature.  I feel comfortable challenging our users to expand the way they use technology, but I'm not about to try to implement some crazy new feature just because it's cool tech.

So I have a question for you.  What websites do you think do a good job of being cutting edge without jumping all over every bandwagon they can find?  Who is truly leading the industry creatively without leaving the users behind?