At a meta-level, I wonder if there's this un-talked about advantage of poaching ambitious talent out of an established incumbent to work a new product line in a new organization, in this case Apple Silicon disrupting Intel/AMD. And we've also seen SpaceX do this NASA/Boeing, and OpenAI do it to Google's ML departments.

It seems like large, unchallenged organizations like Intel (or NASA or Google) collect all the top talent out of school. But changing budgets, changing business objectives, frozen product strategies make it difficult for emerging talent to really work on next-generation technology (those projects have already been assigned to mid-career people who "paid their dues").

Then someone like Apple Silicon with M-chip or SpaceX with Falcon-9 comes along and poaches the people most likely to work "hardcore" (not optimizing for work/life balance) while also giving the new product a high degree of risk tolerance and autonomy. Within a few years, the smaller upstart organization has opened up in un-closeable performance gap with behemoth incumbent.

Has anyone written about this pattern (beyond Innovator's Dilemma)? Does anyone have other good examples of this?