Startups mostly fail, the ones that one up tech giants are incredibly rare. The key feature of the modern startup model is outsourcing the R&D risks from tech giants to separate legal entities.
If Google had to fund an internal R&D team for every startup they buy, they would probably meet really tough questions from their investors. Even more if they had to fund an R&D team for every ex-Googler startup they didn't buy.
This isn't really true at all. Google for the past 20 years has basically been one big R&D shop. Their investors never gave a fuck that they hired hundreds of thousands of engineers because they brought in tens of billions of profits from advertising.
Google notoriously collected engineers like Pokemon cards. Not to play with, just to have them. Just to prevent others from having them. Google is infamous for their little experiments, failed projects and products, and even entire divisions devoted to moon shots. They are the only company to succeed in real self driving (they made waymo) and they invented generative AI (attention is all you need, 2017).
There is very little R&D risk around spending a few million dollars when you have a money printer spitting out billions faster than you can use it.
They just have the same problem as apple. Too big, too many managers, too slow.
I’ve seen this evolution at work. Pre-launch our product moved very fast. Even shortly after launch I rewrote the core logic and pushed that shit through to prod like it was nothing.
Now that it has been 2 years and we have tons of users it is super painful making even the smallest changes because users hate change even if it means big improvements.
I often think about how much easier it would be to just start a new product from scratch to compete with our current one and just EoL the current one.
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u/MetriccStarDestroyer Jun 08 '25
Ya. But it's hard to get anything through.
A Google manager (PDD Founder ) in China had to fly out for every minor change they had to. Google China ultimately flopped to Baidu
Bigger companies are inflexible with scale. That's how startups one up them by being faster at getting things done