Do you think a company w less diversified source of income would be willing to take more risk, knowing that room for error is very small?

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Ukv 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Observationally, larger companies already in the lead seem prefer a safe X% return for their shareholders and don't need to take large risks. Smaller companies trying to make it don't have the liberty to rest on their laurels, and often will be risking it all on some idea being a massive hit.

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mint5 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Following that logic, Microsoft and oracle should be putting out a lot of innovative quirky software!

I can’t think of a single example where a super large company gets more willing to take risks when it gets larger. Theres probably a few exceptions but I can’t think of any.

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serf 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the most obvious display of risk aversion is the greenlighting and production of "Spiderman 35 Electric Boogaloo" and "Batman # 740 The Dark Knight Re-Rises Again" -- meanwhile indies are still struggling to find first investors or writing money.

as I said in another comment : These large firms do not take risk.

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happymellon 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All I asked for was a citation, as my observations have been that smaller companies are more willing to take risks as they need to survive.

The larger the corporation, the more risk adverse they are.

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bko 12 hours ago | parent [-]

You don't need a citation for everything. It's common sense.

But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.

That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.

Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?

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shagmin 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How much of Meta's r&d is spent on keeping people addicted to their apps? I'd argue Amazon and Meta were both more innovative when there was no or very little revenue.

Meta essentially replaced myspace, which basically went down hill after being bought out by a much larger company.

	▲	bko 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why do you ask questions you can easily ask to an LLM? You probably don't care, your world view is "Meta bad". Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember. What are you talking about?

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mint5 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That world model is not in touch with reality.

R&D spend does not correlate with innovation or creativity. It’s surprising what gets counted as R&D in a big company.

Small companies have to have an innovative product in order to compete with the big fish who operate economies of scale.

	▲	bko 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Very productive comment. Here is my reply: R&D spend does correlate with innovation and creativity. It’s surprising what it takes to consider something as R&D in a big company.

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avisser 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

start-ups spend over 100% of revenue on risky ventures.

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inigyou 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, because if they don't take the risk they are guaranteed to collapse. History supports this idea.

	▲	mint5 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		History well supports that large companies do not innovate well, with nearly all collapsing due to stagnation and bureaucracy. A predicted bad outcome does not mean they can avoid it