Are Big Tech Incubation Labs Good Preparation For Being A Startup Founder?

Many companies will have a skunkworks or incubation division. Meta has New Product Experimentation (NPE), Google has Area 120, and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and others all have toy projects.

Despite being branded as a “startup within a big company”, there are some important differences to keep in mind between these roles and real entrepreneurship:

• Apps launched within larger companies have a huge unfair advantage in being able to leverage the parent company’s distribution channels.
• There’s not as much urgency or risk in these divisions since, even if the app fails, the staff will just get reallocated to other parts of the company.
• Most of these projects eventually get killed by the parent company since they’re looking for multi-billion dollar market opportunities.

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