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Comment by SavantIdiot | Hacker News Reader

> Google, Apple, Airbnb, Stripe, none became the giants they are because they spent billions on a grand vision.

Google set out to catalog the entire internet on day one. If that's not a grand vision that they spent billions on, what is?

AirBNB set out to disrupt the entire vacation rental market.

Stripe set out to disrupt the entire POS payment market.

Apple is the only one who fits your narrative: they set out to make a hobby PC then Jobs wanted to ... oh right, disrupt the entire PC market with Mac, but that came 7 years later so OK.

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Might be good to take a closer look at history.

#GOOGLE

Google started as a research project called BackRub. It only turned into Google and a mission after it started taking too much bandwidth on Stanford's servers

Source: https://inshorts.com/en/news/google-began-as-a-research-proj...

#AIRBNB

Airbnb began just so that the founders could make some extra money to pay rent. Not to disrupt an industry.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-airbnb-was-founded-a-vis...

#STRIPE

Stripe was just a small project so the founders could simplify getting paid for their other side projects.

Source: https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-...

# GOOGLE

"calling it a "web crawler" designed to roam the web. "

I'm right.

# STRIPE "At the time Patrick was working on several side projects and they debated why it was so difficult to accept payments on the web. They sought to solve the problem and see if it was possible to make it simple - really simple. "

I'm right.

# AIRBNB

I'm wrong.

The first two set out to do something huge.

The OP probably means once a company is already established and has their core product peaked at max profit, they struggle to innovate further and build new products. Working at FAANG; I can see the desperation my org has in trying to build the next generation to remain relevant.

He also said “build something small for a small audience” and that applies to the start of all the companies you mentioned. Even Google. Back then, the internet was small, and enthousiasts a small group (relative to the global population).

> Not sure what you are smoking, but can I have some?

Why would you feel this is necessary?

(edit: I see you edited it away, but I still feel like it’s worth calling out.)

Stop making words up that the author did not say

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