[personjerry]

You have to make big bets to continue winning. It's easy for us to sit in our armchairs and criticize their failures, but for example their plays with going mobile-first in 2008 and the acquisition of Instagram in 2012 worked out very well.

[boxed]

It's better to make many small bets and when they start to take off, THEN put the foot on the pedal. Zuck has been notoriously bad at creating new products, so betting the company on that he'll manage it this time seems like a very bad idea.

[benjaminwootton]

Buying Instagram was a real jaw dropping moment if I remember. $1 billion sounded like a lot of money back in the day!

[sicp-enjoyer]

How do you start a Tesla with small bets?

[boxed]

With the roadster.

He also started SpaceX with Falcon 1, not Falcon 9, and certainly not Starship.

[sicp-enjoyer]

That's a good point. The principle of proving a simple possible version makes sense. Just pointing out that those "small" steps Tesla took are already a lot bigger than most software projects.

[boxed]

Mostly because those projects are badly mismanaged from before they even write the first line of code :P

[randomsearch]

hmm, maybe, but it seems like a golden age for tech where it was hard to fail from a strong starting position. MS, Google, Amazon, Apple, have all done much better than Facebook.