I feel like no one is willing to face up to the obvious truth: founders are not magical, they’re lucky. There isn’t a magic spark that gets lost. They get lucky

I feel like no one is willing to face up to the obvious truth: founders are not magical, they’re lucky. There isn’t a magic spark that gets lost. They get lucky with breakthrough products. They are incredibly smart annd hardworking but also lucky. Even under ideal circumstances of fostering and developing new ideas, there is no reason to believe their luck will continue, no matter how much talent there is under one roof. And this is not even considering the other structural barriers to innovation! The vast income streams create their own disincentives to disruption. Coordination is hard when you need to get buy-in of many departments. And despite best efforts, at scale, you end up promoting people good at politics or appearances. But even if all that were somehow eliminated, and true startup-style innovation was possible inside a giant company, the company must be careful to defend their existing winners. If Google ever started to enter a death spiral like Apple in the 90s, maybe they could pivot if they were lucky enough to get visionary leadership. But now? Why would they? I worked at Google briefly during the post-IPO period. It was a kind of wonderland, I won’t deny that. But all the really big hits were acquisitions or extensions of Google’s core competencies: search and ads. Everything else was unfocused and half-baked, and this especially applied to ideas that came directly from the founders. (Anyone remember Google Base?) If you really want Google to return to those days you’d have to tolerate a lot of crap that gets abandoned later. (Which is the other complaint that people have about Google. Too experimental or not experimental enough, make up your minds!)