In my home country (India) it’d be impossible for a company to reach such valuations based only on research and prototypes, which in turn leads to low salaries for STEM people, culminating in brain drain.
On the same context,
Imagine if Boston Dynamics was only involved with drones, it would have never changed hands.
My point was that the economic culture in the US supports and this kind of innovation. No other country - maybe barring China, can do that.
I’m not praising the US as a country either (infact I’m moving to Canada). The US has deep flaws but it’s one redeeming quality is industrial innovation.
BD had already started selling its robots(Spot, Pick) commercially and had even had projected a plan for profitability[1].
Current sale is not really an indicative of its inability to make money but rather desperate situation of Softbank VF after string of poor bets, this must have been hard as Masayoshi Son is a self-acknowledged robophile.
[1]https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/14/boston-dynamics-ceo-profi...
When absurd deals are happening it could mean the bubble is about to burst though.
One individual company with less than 2k employees is valued 1/10th of what 220 million people collectively produce in a year. How can one explain this asymmetry. No doubt it was the biggest tech acquisition in the history but tech executives in the US bolstered by Fed's dollar printing have been breaking paper records almost every year.
Maybe I do not understand the economics of this well so I would gladly accept any roast of my above observation.
1) They are desperate to continue growing and need acquisitions to do so
2) They believe Slack is their best bet to boost their revenue in the coming years
In saying that, the asymmetry is the markets each of them serve though. Are majority of Pakistani's serving B2B customers with a SaaS? No, and so the profit/revenue generation is different.
However the analogy with Pakistan is incorrect. Pakistan has a lot of people who simply don’t have the skills to be productive. Same with India. And in South Asia progress and reform doesn’t happen easily.
As a side effect home prices in the US remain relatively stable.
In India it’s impossible for a single income family to own a home and it’s a struggle with dual incomes. Same with Canada where I’m planning to move (since I don’t have patience to wait 20 years to start my own company)