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It is tough to keep two widely different businesses under one roof. One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Spotify should spin of

It is tough to keep two widely different businesses under one roof. One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Spotify should spin off Backstage as a separate company, providing the initial IP and funding and being the first client. Many companies, like Uber, created a lot of useful infra, though they failed to monetize it. They could take a cut in the Chronosphere (M3) and Temporal (Cadence). Much better than laying off people, though origin companies would need to be smart, without being too greedy. Though the model is unproven.

anonzzzies 2y ago
> One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Amazon/AWS?
- jakozaur 2y ago
  Amazon is an outlier, where each business runs its profit/loss, and higher-ups act as VCs. Wish more companies were like that, but you need to take a lot of bets to make that work. AWS worked, but the Fire phone turned out to be a write-off.
  - gghffguhvc 2y ago
    Fire Phone was largely outsourced I’ve been told. Was big regrets all the way to the top about that decision. Lesson learned.
    - theturtletalks 2y ago
      If anything, AWS looks like the outlier compared to their other projects. It only survived because of the sheer size of Amazon.com and was built to accommodate that traffic and deployment. If they set out to create AWS without the need for it, don’t think it would’ve made it this far. Even after all these years, AWS is the breadwinner, while the website it was made for can barely turn a profit and resorts to increase the price of prime every year to show revenue growth.
vasco 2y ago
I think you are describing spin-in's. Made famous by Cisco. Didn't catch on much.
financetechbro 2y ago
Many companies, like uber, use their other more profitable business units to subsidize other business units. It doesn’t always make sense to spin out a company / product
frompdx 2y ago
Backstage is an open source CNCF project. It needs a corporate sponsor to keep it alive.

anonzzzies 2y ago

> One is a mature, public B2C, and the other is a dev tooling startup. Amazon/AWS?

jakozaur 2y ago
Amazon is an outlier, where each business runs its profit/loss, and higher-ups act as VCs. Wish more companies were like that, but you need to take a lot of bets to make that work. AWS worked, but the Fire phone turned out to be a write-off.
- gghffguhvc 2y ago
  Fire Phone was largely outsourced I’ve been told. Was big regrets all the way to the top about that decision. Lesson learned.
  - theturtletalks 2y ago
    If anything, AWS looks like the outlier compared to their other projects. It only survived because of the sheer size of Amazon.com and was built to accommodate that traffic and deployment. If they set out to create AWS without the need for it, don’t think it would’ve made it this far. Even after all these years, AWS is the breadwinner, while the website it was made for can barely turn a profit and resorts to increase the price of prime every year to show revenue growth.

vasco 2y ago

I think you are describing spin-in's. Made famous by Cisco. Didn't catch on much.

financetechbro 2y ago

Many companies, like uber, use their other more profitable business units to subsidize other business units. It doesn’t always make sense to spin out a company / product

frompdx 2y ago

Backstage is an open source CNCF project. It needs a corporate sponsor to keep it alive.