[wsetchell]

Google takes large long-term bets that are closely related to their core business / competency. Some of those seem to be clearly working (see Cloud, Deepmind). As a shareholder, I want to see more of those.

Back when I was at Google, X (which many Other Bets came from) had a goal of all their projects having meaningful impact in 10 years. They've been working on Wing and Waymo for close to 10 years now. Those projects are not yet meaningfully impacting many people.

As an armchair CEO, I have doubts about the compensation (more salary / less equity vs startups) and funding (fewer choices funding sources for the companies, weird incentives for the investors vs VC funds) model for "Other Bets". Based off of that and the lack of results, I think they should force the Other Bets to stand on their own vs handing them more cash to burn.

[why_only_15]

It's true they haven't had a lot of real world impact, but it seems to be widely recognized in self-driving spheres that Waymo is #1, and they're valued at $100B (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-val...) which seems like a pretty good return. I think it's fair for them to continue plowing money into Waymo when the money they've put in so far people think could have returns.

[wsetchell]

Waymo has the best technology in self driving.

They have not deployed their tech at scale, when competitors (Tesla) has widely deployed worse technology.

Even if they deploy their tech widely, it isn't clear it will generate significant revenue/profit. It might not be that expensive (think less than 1B) to build a good enough self driving car in 10 years. That'd create competition and drive down prices.

Someone else might figure out how to capture the value of self driving cars too. Maybe the profitable parts of self driving cars are the "apps" you can build once self driving cars are cheap.

I wouldn't invest in Waymo at 100B until they have a real business with real revenue and a real moat to protect that business.