From the ex-Google-in-the-last-five-years people I've talked to, it's very hard to truly operate that way when you have Google resources at your disposal. And t

From the ex-Google-in-the-last-five-years people I've talked to, it's very hard to truly operate that way when you have Google resources at your disposal. And the hardest-to-account-for of those resources is the credibility and marketing, since it's the furthest away from what engineers do day to day. For every project that we see that Google shuts down recently, we probably wouldn't have even heard about them if they were truly operating like a startup with startup resources. The projects were never good enough to get traction organically without that initial Google-name-bump or bundling when it was released publicly. Would any of their messaging apps in the past half decade had ever made a dent in the first place outside of the Google umbrella? Would anyone have tried to do Stadia independently (Quibi says "maybe" but in that case the massive capital gamble and poor return was much more obvious as a standalone enterprise, so it got abandoned much more quickly, even)? If you take "I'll have the chance to get this in front of customers" [because Google] for granted, it's very easy to get lost in a sea of "try to make it the perfect version of itself" instead of "what is the differentiator and unique need this is addressing?"