So why not lease the tech to a different company under a different brand they own and release it?

Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

Nobody is going to care if Google releases a ChatGPT bot on a different website.

That's what I'd do... specifically, I'd license Google tech to ex-google employees who want to start a company, in return for an 80% ownership stake.

It would be a 'you can use all google internal code and infrastructure, for free, as long as you don't use google branding and don't use our user data' deal.

The companies would have the benefits of google tech, without being tied down by internal politics, procedures, risk management, etc.

They could afford to do things like just release a product to the world rather than have a legal and PR team go over every detail for every law in every country worldwide as part of a 6 month long review process.

Lol, think from the founder / teams perspectives. Giving 80% ownership would be insane. How could you build a company like that? It’s not so simple.

Those are called Spin-Ins. Now abandoned, Cisco once pioneered this model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348900

The closest Google had to it was Area 120, which has also been abandoned?

Isn't this what incubators do now?

The value add by most incubators and accelerators is minimal, compared to what a large parent company can provide though.

The sort of people who would accept those terms are not the sort of people you want to build a startup.

I might take that 80% deal, for the right killer IP that I knew how to apply in a marketable way, and a couple years of sufficient GCP credits.

I might bootstrap revenue without much hiring, so that business success means the team does better financially than the sure-thing FIRE if they'd just taken a FAANG job and grinded promotions.

This business giving away 80% equity would lean on the value of IP, and on knowing how to be very effective with solo/small teams -- not 'scale' in the sense of trying to herd hundreds of software and product and business people. (This is another thing that big orgs can have trouble doing, and so sometimes do insulated spinoffs/units instead, just to unburden people.)

I think they basically employ that model already at Area 120 [0]. This interview platform called Byteboard was spun out of Area 120 a couple of years ago, and I imagine Google has a large ownership stake in it, while avoiding the brand association [1].

[0] https://area120.google.com/

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/05/technical-interview-platfo...

> Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

That might have been true at some point - but a combination of their extremely loud rebranding of both to Meta, and the media constantly saying 'Instagram, which is owned by FB' or words to that effect has changed it. Even my elderly parents are aware Instagram is owned by FB / Meta.

I feel like this was done so retail investors would know Instagram was owned by Meta. Not users.

If that was the case, I wouldn't be greeted by the new Meta logo every time I open the WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook apps.

That could be because Meta doesn't have the same negative connotation FB does.

> Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

They're pretty upfront with it... It says "By Meta" on the launch screen

I know many people who use WhatsApp every day who are still surprised when I say it’s owned by Facebook/meta. They just don’t see what they don’t want to see.

I know people who I remind this to regularly, and they just don't care enough to remember.

> Nobody knows FB owns Instagram.

Even my non tech friends know.

So much effort that could have gone into making it actually usable. i don't think the product has improved much since it was released. Even very basic things like "navigate to Walmart by bus" actually don't work.

More things that don't work:

1. Delete the last screenshot.

2. Set timezone to est

3. Turn on hotspot

4. Turn on nearby sharw

Most of this is due to androids permissions model. The Google app doesn't have permissions required to do any of those 4 things.

However, it should at least just ask for permission the first time you try to do that.

It can’t be as simple as someone Googling “how to request permissions on Android” – this kind of thing is a product decision. I would assume it’s more due to their promotions culture: are any of those getting demoed on a big screen at I/O?

I don't think it's due to the permissions model. Google Play Services has almost all permissions on your device by default.