When I worked at mega corps, I'd see a "new" tech emerged that was always very similar to a software that our company had developed to solve similar issues. I remember terraform getting released and seeing that it was just an inferior version of the Cloud Formation Template generator someone at my company had invented years prior.
I've seen this happen so many times and every time, I'm surprised that more businesses don't spin off cool internal projects like this into startups. Hashicorp's market cap is roughly 10% of the market cap of the megacorp I used to work for. And right now, my team is working on an internal project to fill the gaps left by various authentication providers we use. But instead of spinning this off into it's own business, they are just kind of waiting around for someone else to develop a better product so they can buy it instead.
It was explained to me that investors generally don't like spinning off internal projects because it can be a distraction, but it does feel like investors are leaving a billion+ dollars on the table. Especially given the absurd P/E multiples software startups enjoy.
To circle this comment back, I think a lot of staff engineers are working on the next generation of cool technology right now. But they might be working at boring old companies, like a massive retailer, and eventually that internal project will get replaced by one built by the engineer who decides to venture on their own and replicate what they were building as a stand-alone product.
There is a simple reason why megacorps don't spin off projects: they would need someone with vision to search for these projects and with high authority to proceed on the spin off. They don't have this kind of people, for the obvious reason that it is not their main concern. Executives in any megacorp are 100% busy making the core business a success, and investing time in small projects that may come to nothing is just a distraction. This may just explain why big corporations are just a waste of time and resources, in the long term.
Not just that they don't have those people. They also don't have the money. Because most companies are operating with someone else's money. It belongs to the shareholders or the investors or the bank. And they have been entrusted with that money in order to conduct a very particular business venture.
If they go off using that money to spin up side-hustles selling engineering tools, they're taking risks with someone else's money to do something they weren't told to do.
My experience at mega corps has been the opposite: instead of a widespread, open source, robust implementation we had to suffer with a home grown, poorly supported, buggy, inferior product because it had the sponsorship of a politically important executive.
Truly dispiriting to be unable to use JSON or Protobuf, because some executive director claims his “standard” is better when it is demonstrably not so. In the end it breeds a culture of mediocrity — management has made it clear that engineering excellence is not a priority. So support the business use case, but do whatever …
I think this is the key: employment contracts/ip policies should be designed to encourage spinning off internal projects (that are ‘distractions’ front he core product) as separate business units or as open source projects.
FWIW, the founder of HashiCorp created Vangrant when they are in college.
Why did Terraform end up being the dominant product? Product-market fit. That’s not just engineering, but bringing to market a product at the time when people need and understand it. This includes marketing and educating. Also, Terraform has an ecosystem of prebuilt providers. NPM as a package manager is not as well designed as other systems, but it’s arguably been the most successful. While the internal prop tech you mentioned may be more advanced, it’s not obvious you had the right product people with vision to build out that ecosystem. Most managers and product people at large companies aren’t tech savvy beyond buzzwords
I've seen this happen so many times and every time, I'm surprised that more businesses don't spin off cool internal projects like this into startups. Hashicorp's market cap is roughly 10% of the market cap of the megacorp I used to work for. And right now, my team is working on an internal project to fill the gaps left by various authentication providers we use. But instead of spinning this off into it's own business, they are just kind of waiting around for someone else to develop a better product so they can buy it instead.
It was explained to me that investors generally don't like spinning off internal projects because it can be a distraction, but it does feel like investors are leaving a billion+ dollars on the table. Especially given the absurd P/E multiples software startups enjoy.
To circle this comment back, I think a lot of staff engineers are working on the next generation of cool technology right now. But they might be working at boring old companies, like a massive retailer, and eventually that internal project will get replaced by one built by the engineer who decides to venture on their own and replicate what they were building as a stand-alone product.