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Businesses are built from the ground up to succeed in the business they are already in. Any entrepreneur who's built one, or anyone who oversees operations of a

by unabst 10y ago

Businesses are built from the ground up to succeed in the business they are already in. Any entrepreneur who's built one, or anyone who oversees operations of a company knows that each component has a specific purpose, and the process of ensuring they all work and click is painstakingly tedious, fragile, and requires maintenance overhead (the guy overseeing operations is one of them). So to say "they have money and smart people, they can do anything, why not innovate" is completely ignoring how businesses grow, come to fruition, and ultimately profit. Google's profit mainly comes from Adwords. Their history involves entrepreneurship, an awesome search engine, a new philosophy for a top page, and a ton of innovation. They even kept their innovative (and academic) roots for as long as they could in the form of Google Labs, which one can only assume they had high hopes for considering the talent they had and the amount of freedom they gave them. But it was no Bell Labs or an IBM in their heyday. It shut down in 2011, because the business arm couldn't justify it. They didn't need hobby projects. Google needed bigger and faster innovation to meet the scale of their resources and potential returns to match, so they focused more on phones, cars, AI, and robots. And now they exercise true big corporate innovation. Innovation is bought. They buy it, work on it, then sell it if it doesn't work out (as they did with their headless robotic dogs). Big corporations cannot pay entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurs under their umbrella. No one can. They can pay researchers to do research, engineers to build things, and designers to come up with new products and services. But entrepreneurs are not for hire. The moment they're hired, they stop being true entrepreneurs. But their companies are often for sale -- the business they built from the ground up to succeed in the specific business they're in (or just for IP if they're a technology play). And innovation is easy to measure when it's already there for sale in front of you.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Counterexample: Goldman Sachs and Buffet's stuff. They hire and pay entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurs, managers, and product developers. Many of their top people bringing in big dollars have attributes of all of these. Their job function just brings the money back to the parent company instead of a random investor. There's nothing about big companies that prevent entrepreneur-like activity within. Usually, just their management culture if anything.
- unabst 10y ago
  It's not a counterexample. What you provided is an example of an entrepreneur managing business. Many large corps have tried this, and for the most part have gotten more out of these efforts in the form of brand benefits and PR (as an innovation first company, yada yada) than actual profit. Toyota in Japan is highly entrepreneurial per se, except they still only make their billions from cars. And the problem with these efforts is in the entrepreneurs. If they're working on sure businesses from scratch, then it's like opening a Starbucks where you know it will make money. That's not innovation, that's just good aggressive profit-sniffing business. The best entrepreneurs will continue to quit their jobs to focus on their companies. Hence all the ex-Facebook, ex-Google, and ex-Wall Street founders doing startups. I doubt Jeff Bezos would have considered a career at Goldman Sachs for what he hand in mind with Amazon. Doubt they'd even hire him to do it. And them hiring entrepreneurs to be managers and product developers is exactly what I said. They stop being entrepreneurs.

by unabst 10y ago

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Counterexample: Goldman Sachs and Buffet's stuff. They hire and pay entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurs, managers, and product developers. Many of their top people bringing in big dollars have attributes of all of these. Their job function just brings the money back to the parent company instead of a random investor. There's nothing about big companies that prevent entrepreneur-like activity within. Usually, just their management culture if anything.

unabst 10y ago
It's not a counterexample. What you provided is an example of an entrepreneur managing business. Many large corps have tried this, and for the most part have gotten more out of these efforts in the form of brand benefits and PR (as an innovation first company, yada yada) than actual profit. Toyota in Japan is highly entrepreneurial per se, except they still only make their billions from cars. And the problem with these efforts is in the entrepreneurs. If they're working on sure businesses from scratch, then it's like opening a Starbucks where you know it will make money. That's not innovation, that's just good aggressive profit-sniffing business. The best entrepreneurs will continue to quit their jobs to focus on their companies. Hence all the ex-Facebook, ex-Google, and ex-Wall Street founders doing startups. I doubt Jeff Bezos would have considered a career at Goldman Sachs for what he hand in mind with Amazon. Doubt they'd even hire him to do it. And them hiring entrepreneurs to be managers and product developers is exactly what I said. They stop being entrepreneurs.