This is such a bean-counter MBA perspective. It’s tech, if you want real growth, you need moonshot ideas. If you want to just become a GE style dependable divided stock, then fine, but your shareholders aren’t going to triple their wealth again.
Nobody is saying reduce moonshot ideas to zero. There's a difference between "throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks" to having a risk/reward way of prioritizing what to fund. What you're alluding to is the "grow at all costs and find a way to be profitable later" strategy that is prevalent in SV, but tends to not work so well in real economic downturns. Sometimes I think people either forget, or are too young, to remember that the pre-2021 decade+ of near-zero interest rates are a historical anomaly.
Put differently, take a look at the R&D costs of google[1]. Note how, despite a constantly increasing amount of investment, they still derive 80% of their revenue from ads. Granted, some of the R&D will contribute to ads revenue, but it may also be indicative of a moonshot strategy that isn't contributing much in terms of "real growth" in alternative revenue streams.
Does a moonshot mean funding a team of 50 without tangible goals for ten years? The original google moonshots leaned heavily on individual engineers producing Herculean results eg gmail.
