If you’re a person of a certain age, you smile when someone asks to see your ID at a bar. If a company gets to that age, you smile if someone says you act like a startup.

Executives of established companies always like to talk about a startup mentality. They spill out sentences filled with phrases such as “fast-eating-slow,” “failing fast,” and “death-to-bureaucracy.” But there comes a sad moment in life when you should stop wearing your favorite band’s concert T-shirts. And once you get to a certain scale as a business, it’s difficult to maintain that kind of energy—and few businesses do.

The path to this is organic. Startups are always looking to a huge future payday, which creates an excitement that no bonus structure can match. They are also (and no one will tell you this) often inefficient, which is fine in the beginning. But as companies grow, they have processes and infrastructure to maintain and optimize. That’s when they usually bring mature leaders to run the business as efficiently as possible. 

But don’t despair, all is not lost. We still have some exciting new ways today incorporate some of the startup spirit in larger businesses. Here are a few possibilities:

Startup U

It’s never been easier to go back to school. Around the Net, you can find plenty of resources on being a better entrepreneur. Y Combinator, for example, offers Startup School, a massively open online course (MOOC). You can also find great ideas and skills offered by podcasters like Tim Ferriss and James Altucher, training companies like General Assembly, and entrepreneurial ecosystems like Techstars. While it may seem weird for large company execs to use these resources, my own experience with them is not that they can make you overnight into a startup, but they add tricks to your toolbox that can make you more agile and exciting.

Shopping Around

Startup entrepreneurs are always eager to chat about their businesses. But when most large companies talk mergers, partnerships, and acquisitions, they only do so with companies of a certain scale. Why not look small too? For example, I like to meet with startups in the ecosystems of support services built up around Amazon, AT&T, Microsoft, and Google. They often have great perspectives on their bigger parent, and what’s coming next. Chatting with them helps my business serve its customers better and identify acquisition targets others might miss. 

Throwing Events

Chances are, people at big companies have outside interests. So why not hold events that celebrate side projects? And I don’t mean a weekly brown-bag passion lunch. With technology today, you can easily do this on a global scale. Throw a party in which employees share what they are inspired by and bring their personal passions to work. An especially good take on this is Spotify’s policy of encouraging stupid side projects. In this vein, a small team at my company recently helped launch strawlessocean.org and the Lonely Whale Foundation at SXSW. Projects like that help keep your entrepreneurial pencil sharp.

That said, just as a 45-year-old shouldn’t act like a teenager, an established company probably shouldn’t try too hard to fit back into its startup jeans. The more you force it, the less it’ll happen. A better idea is to take the new ideas and approaches that make sense for you. That’s why things like events, education, and the occasional meeting with dreamy young companies are a great way to keep yourself thinking young. To be honest, it’s been a long time since anyone asked for my ID, but the startup comment? Yeah, I still get it occasionally.

Originally published on Linkedin Pulse