It's easy to dismiss Silicon Valley companies as trivial, but if nothing else, SV stands for a culture of experimentation. This, by contrast, sounds like an engineer's nightmare:
> “In other years we hid him [McCune] behind the curtain and slipped him some sandwiches so management wouldn’t know what the investment was,” he jokes.
Maybe a decades-long attention span wouldn't have been required in the first place if the company in question gave their engineers better support.