My first project at a FANG made something like $42M for the company its first year, about $100M in total. There were 3 engineers working on it, and it cost the company maybe $500K in total. Great return on investment, right?

Except my Director wasn't in charge of making money, his job was to increase user happiness, typically measured as the proportion of interactions that were "successful". And this project didn't do this - since it encouraged browsing behavior (poking around without a goal), it actually decreased "successful" interactions. So the project was canceled and threatened with unlaunching about 18 months in.

I was like "Well can I buy it off you? $42M might be rounding error for you, but I'd love to have a business with a $42M ARR." But ultimately this was a no-go as well, because it used company infrastructure, user data, sale relationships, etc and negotiating that contract (along with all the legal and reputational risks to the parent company) would've cost a bunch more than $42M. Ultimately he was like "Well, if it's making that much money, maybe it should be transferred over to department that's actually in charge of making money", and that's where it landed for the next few years, until $100M became rounding error in the company's annual revenue and it wasn't worth that executive's time to sponsor it.

Projects have to move the needle for the executive that sponsors them, otherwise it's not worth their attention. Zillow made about $2.7B in 2019, with 47% gross margins. If Zillow Offers was profitable but could only flip say 1000 houses/year at a profit of $50K/house, that's only $50M, basically 2% of their existing revenue. It just doesn't move the needle for the shareholders, which means it won't move the needle for the CEO, which means it's not worth his attention. They needed it to be a substantial fraction of sales in the U.S. - if it had made a profit of $100K on $3M homes/year, that's a $3B business, more than double Zillow's existing revenue, at potentially higher margins.