Jeff Bezos on Bet-the-Company Bets

Jeff Bezos, back in 2014 in an interview with Henry Blodget:

What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.

Is Facebook’s AR/VR play really a bet-the-company bet? To me it feels like it. They changed the name of the whole company and supposedly have over 10,000 employees working on it. What else are they betting on for the future, other than hamfistedly trying to turn Instagram into a Frankensteinian amalgam of TikTok and QVC.

★ Friday, 2 September 2022