Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.

Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.

Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.

When you have nothing, risk is cheap. Once you make it, the strategy tends to shift from growth to protection.