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Comment by xemoka | Hacker News Reader

They didn't, no one asked google to do it. It was Paul Buchheit's 20% project. Google saw a good thing, solved by someone who knew what they were doing and where they wanted it to go, and fostered it. Hell, it is what built AdWords and ultimately made google the advertising behemoth it is today. I don't think this is the same thing...

I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constraints, but I'm not sure that chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.

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Why does it seem like everyone is having trouble grasping an analogy? GP was saying that as it doesn't make sense for a power company to solve trains (because it is out of their area of expertise) it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to solve Slack (because it is out of their area of expertise). My response is that a surprising number of things can fall in the area of expertise of a technology company, and this has been proven by Google in the past.

Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.

People look for something to disagree with, and make posts that "engage". I agree with you and see this a lot, an analogy clearly makes point A but people get hung up on detail B.

Yep, and it was completely just fluke too, because within 5 years of that they'd butchered/tamed the whole concept of 20% and that kind of independent project wasn't a thing anybody at Google could do, even if 20% still nominally existed [re-routed to be "you can add 20% to some project at Google that already exists and is approved by corporate already, etc. and btw you'll still be doing your normal work for most of the time, too"]

When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.

> Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.

You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.

Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.

Not that Valve doesn't have its own problems.

i don't know, i think this guy got you dead to rights on how reductive of a point of view you have

> chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.

that's all taking risks means

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