Google+

When Google bought Android Inc. in July 2005, the startup had no product, no revenue, and only 8 employees. Larry Page saw what others missed: the mobile phone would become the primary computing device, and whoever controlled the OS would control the gateway to the internet. That $50 million bet became the foundation of a platform running on 3 billion+ devices.

By the early 2000s, Google was growing rapidly and faced a classic innovator's dilemma: how to maintain the scrappy, experimental culture of a startup while scaling to thousands of engineers.

In the early 2000s, search engines had a monetization problem.

Google+ is remembered as the social network that couldn't beat Facebook. The real story is worse: 90% of user sessions lasted under five seconds, and the average user spent 3.3 minutes a month on it versus 7.5 hours on Facebook. It was never a place. It was a layer.