[1] https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/using-google-wonder-wheel-...

Throughout the article, is the explicitly stated assumption that Google's enemies/critics are evil. Google has plenty of good critics with good criticisms. That's precisely the kind of substrate of viewpoint, in which Google is somehow anointed, which Lauren forwards and which underlies the very Google hubris she decries.

i don't think Google missing it, i think they're running a similar model to VC - better hit another one or a couple of 100B+ Unicorns than a 100 of 100M small businesses.

>Google was the only place he knew where you could get fired after creating a $100M/year ARR business. That is only $25M/quarter which was only a .3% increase in revenue, so a loser right?

the same like VC do - no signs of horn in 2-3 years, just cut the "losses" (i.e. take your 2-4x investment growth) and move on.

It occurs to me that the VC model itself makes a certain set of assumptions about where we are in the economic cycle. It only works if a.) there are industries that can be reinvented by the application of technology in a way that disrupts all the existing firms and b.) those firms are too blind, too set in their ways, or too structurally rigid to adapt that technology.

This has been the case from the 1980s onwards, but was not the case from roughly 1920-1980. At some point we're going to hit the end of the current cycle, and then any firm based upon that assumption is just going to die through bad bets. I don't think we're there yet, but it's interesting to think about the assumptions underlying the model.

In his investment class Martin Shkreli talked about this topic in specific. Its just that after a while you realize you can't squeeze much juice out of a fruit anymore, no matter hard you try. At that point, your only options are acquiring good businesses or starting investing into new ones.

I think the reason why your $100M project was shut down is may be they realized if they wanted wanted make $100M out of something they might as well buy a bond, it makes no sense to run a people team, pay them and manage them all for their scale of profits.

Either way it also looks dripping with hubris if your shutting opportunities that could put $100M on the table with little effort.

I have always found a company to be a mirror of its CEO's personality. Think of Apple under Steve Jobs, Microsoft under Satya Nadella, and Uber under Travis Kalanick. A sense of integrity - or a lack of it - plays a huge role in how we feel about the company.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

I wonder how much of that is because the organization hierarchies and inner machinations of the people structures are opaque to people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin at their level.

Sure these people could form a Google X and search for the next $100 billion businesses.

But if you have $100M/yr opportunity products coming up all over the company and you don't even bother to look at them. You are already losing plenty of potential $10Bn/yr opportunities. It should be perfectly possible for these people to chase both moonshot and sky shot opportunities.

What if you have a product that brings a great deal of value to many people, but for various reasons you can't collect much revenue on it. You could be operating at a loss, but still producing great value. In that case, if there were a way to cover that $20MM/year gap (corporation sinks profits from other divisions into it, for instance) it could be worthwhile.

Or perhaps that business that's losing money brings in customers who go to the other divisions and make them profitable. That is, its return is indirect and hard to measure (though not necessarily hard to verify).