I worked on a project that made over $100M for my employer and then got axed. (Or technically, it got axed by my department after 2 years and then was picked u

I worked on a project that made over $100M for my employer and then got axed. (Or technically, it got axed by my department after 2 years and then was picked up by another department because it was still making money, and then got axed again 2 years later in some priorities reshuffle.) The real answer has to do with org charts and executive attention. If your VP is told that anything less than a billion dollars doesn't matter, he's not going to want to be distracted by anything that you know is going to be worth less than a billion dollars, and is going to want to focus 100% on those opportunities that could be worth more than a billion dollars (even if they have a low chance of success and an expected value much less than $100M). It's possible that some other VP might be interested in it - for example, if you have a product that's made $100M and has a decent chance of growing 2x and another department has a mandate to make $100M this year, it could be an easy win to adopt the $100M project off the $1B department and take credit for its continued growth. But then next year your growth target is $200M and the project may only have $50M worth of growth left in it, so your incentive is to axe it and concentrate on newer initiatives. Same reason that VCs only fund companies that have a potential to single-handedly return the fund, or that hedge funds & private equity will drive well-known brands like Sears into the ground so they can strip the assets and sell them off to more productive companies. Manager attention is worth something, usually in proportion to the amount of capital they're already managing, and so it may not be worth spending the attention needed to make $25M when the resources you have at your disposal are expected to make $250M. That same opportunity could be very attractive to a team of 3 with no outside funding, though, and that's why we have the full-employment theorem for entrepreneurs.