It's also mind blowing to consider that as many other projects, both Linux and Python started as a hobyist project never meant to do more than cater to some personal needs.
This taught me how important is allocating time for your team for their personal projects, as the next school romance anime tagging system could be the cornerstone of every AI in the future.
Except 99.999% of personal projects won't be that popular and allocating time for personal projects is a waste in that regard. Basically you'd be playing lottery and not get anything out of it.
There's plenty of reasons to encourage personal projects, but this isn't one of them.
I didn’t, but I get why. It’s a specious argument — it doesn’t matter if 99% of them are useless. It matters if the 1% that become ubiquitous for whatever reason provide utility that makes the useless ones worth it.
Yeah you can run a company that never provides any time or resources to tinker, but only if you’re okay with innovation never happening again.