This was a running theme in the "original" PG essays. Every big startup story from that era seems to have an episode like Google offering themselves to Yahoo fo

This was a running theme in the "original" PG essays. Every big startup story from that era seems to have an episode like Google offering themselves to Yahoo for $1m. PG (and others) spent a lot of time wondering why the big guys didn't just acquire startups en masse. Now they do. And for most founders, taking that offer is a rational move, even when the company is quite mature. For a non-diversified human, a 100% chance of $50m is worth enormously more than a 10% chance of $500m. What fascinates me is the strategy, pioneered by Facebook, of pushing that logic as far as it will go, and spending hitherto-inconceivable amounts of money to acquire any social networking or communication product that could possibly compete with it, long after they achieve product/market fit but before they're so big as to be a sure thing. I remember when $1bn for Instagram was a lot...