[staysaasy]

I think that this is a very reasonable observation. It's definitely weird in theory, but the reasons that I've seen are:

* Very large tech companies build software (relatively) slowly due to their size

* Sort of like a toddler, you don't know what you want until you see that someone else has it. Another company hitting product/market fit + traction proves the value of a product that you might have just hypothetically wanted

* You're often buying a go-to-market motion (marketing, sales, services, etc) that complements a product

* In some cases, you're buying talent that would be difficult to hire + train on your own _fast_. Ie even if you could theoretically hire 50 traffic mapping engineers, you can get them onboarded onto your team faster by acquiring Waze