One of my employers was spun out twice, after having been acquired years ago. It was sort of a joke to tell people who the owners were. It made no goddamned sense. Sure, we had customers in common, but so do Xerox and people who lease out coffee machines. The toner-flavored coffee jokes practically write themselves.

They just got onto a growth tear and bought a bunch of things they shouldn’t, and eventually rounded up all of the vaguely similar ones and divested.

I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough. Not every idea has to be a billion dollar idea, and a one time cash infusion to five $200M ideas would be a pretty small opportunity cost for them.

The fact that such ideas are not a direct competitor also achieves another goal of overly large employee pools, which is to choke off the supply of talent to upstarts.