I'll give an example of the leadership style of Netflix. Jordan Zimmerman, a great engineer who created Apache Curator, once asked then the director of cloud platform, Yury, if he could open source Curator. Yury just casually said: okay, do it. Jordan was puzzled and asked: "don't I have to talk to an attorney? ". Yury smiled and asked: does an attorney help you write code? Jordan said no, and Yury concluded the conversation: then you don't have to talk to an attorney.

That does not sound like the right question. How about: have we vetted our dependencies' licenses?

I mean like yea, technically they get more "done", but only because they steam roll all their other legal responsibilities

Hiring extremely good engineers is hard, but hiring good managers is far harder. They also are much better at driving out the good talent tan a bad engineering hire is.

"People join companies. They quit managers."

Everything needed to keep a giant super-successful post-product-market-fit company running smoothly and reliably as, say, a VP at Google, is completely the opposite of what you need to move fast when you're trying to figure out how to thrive (or even just survive).

I haven't worked in one of those "this is like a startup inside a big-co" places that you often hear about, but I imagine it's why those struggle to compete with actual startups. It's hard to act like you are facing existential risk when you just plain aren't.