Affording the Luxury of Patience and the One-Year Window
“We’ve always operated on what I call the ‘Five-Year Horizon’”
Over the last 2 weeks I have been consider some comments made when Sundar Pichai sat down with John Collison and Elad Gil on The Cheeky Pint (the most Irish of Podcasts) and the conversation wandered into territory that, on the surface, has nothing to do with ecommerce. Except it does. It has everything to do with ecommerce. It has everything to do with how any of us running businesses right now should think about the decisions we make, or more to the point, the decisions we keep deciding to defer. At least that is my take away - talks of compute and supply and demand were equally interesting but I was particularly smitten by this flippant comment.
Pichai was talking about Google’s internal planning philosophy. The Five-Year Horizon. The idea that when you’re operating at the scale of something like Google, you can afford the luxury of patience. You seed a project, you nurture it, you don’t expect returns until the timeline has breathed out fully. And to be fair, when you’re building something that billions of people use, there’s a version of that logic that makes sense. You don’t want the infrastructure holding up search for half the world’s internet users being redesigned on a whim by someone who had a good idea on a Tuesday. Let’s not forget, they are not building or maintaining just one thing. They have many many businesses to consider.
But then he said something that cracked it open. Because the Five-Year Horizon is now a comfort blanket. A way of making the absence of urgency feel like strategic discipline. And Pichai, to his credit, said that out loud.
We’ve been doing versions of this in ecommerce for years. I know because I’ve sat in the rooms. The platform migration that’s been on the roadmap since 2022. The pricing strategy review that needs three more quarters of data before anyone commits. The international expansion plan that is perpetually almost ready. The Five-Year Horizon is seductive because it gives every delay a rational frame. We’re being considered. We’re being thorough. We’re not rushing. And meanwhile the market is not doing any of those things. But it is in the fog of indecision that up starts and new brands are making their arbitrage moments turn into money.
“The gap between research breakthrough and product utility has shrunk from years to months”
The line that Pichai threw out almost as an aside is the one that has stayed with me longest. The gap between breakthrough and application used to be measured in years. A model architecture paper would land and the industry would spend half a decade working out what to actually do with it. Now the gap is months. Sometimes weeks. The transformer paper dropped in 2017 and in the room with Pichai and the Collisons someone pointed out that if the Five-Year window applied, the Gemini moment should have arrived in 2022. Pichai’s answer was essentially: yes. And we nearly missed it because we were still operating on the old clock.
