That is certainly better than killing thesee projects. Let the team take it and raise external funding with Google keeping some equity and assigning rest to the team.
Instead they licensed the technology to their main customer.
You sure?
Google obfuscates these moonshots (Waymo, Verily) in the “Other Bets” line in their 10-K. They lose money in the aggregate and the detailed financials for each entity aren’t revealed.
If a company like Waymo looked like it were on the path to profitability, Google wouldn’t hide the financials. They report the bare minimum (jumbled up with a bunch of unrelated stuff) because the numbers are grim.
Not sure, maybe I’m missing it, how does that impact spinning-off a project that Google no longer considers financially fruitful (it could still be financially viable but not at Google scale)?