My understanding (as someone who worked at Meta and sold a startup to a large corporation) is that, in this particular case, money-printing giants are cursed by

My understanding (as someone who worked at Meta and sold a startup to a large corporation) is that, in this particular case, money-printing giants are cursed by their own blessing. The thing that prints them money limits them in terms of what margins and growth rates are acceptable. As a public company, your metrics are all bundled for simplicity into EBITDA, profit margins, etc. Investors buying your stock and your existing investors care a lot about these numbers. So when your new product has a lower margin or a lower growth rate, this affects your whole company's metrics. This is why they try to isolate such projects into "labs" and the like, and this is why it's challenging to move from this "lab" into the main company portfolio. Your metrics need to be as high as your main product line - this one-in-a-million exceptional thing that made you huge. Which is pretty impossible. Basically, the bar is very high, and not killing it and maturing it instead has very negative externalities in most cases. And so, it goes to the history dump. Very unfortunate, and as a startup founder, I'd think twice about who to sell to. Also, as a startup founder, I know that often there's not much choice.