A practice of explicitly splitting a company's investment as percentages across a portfolio of current and future initiatives, while planning simultaneously across multiple time horizons (5, 10, 15, and 20 years out). Gibson Biddle cites Netflix's own shifting split as an example: in 2010 the company allocated roughly 20% DVD / 30% streaming / 40% international expansion / 10% original content; by the time of the talk that had moved to roughly 5% DVD / 30% streaming / 30% international / 30% originals / 5% other.
The 2010 split shows Netflix deliberately under-investing in what later became its biggest strength — original content got only 10% of investment while still unproven, versus roughly 30% a decade later.
This pairs with GLEE Model (Get Big, Lead, Expand) (the long-range fuzzy vision) and Growth-Wave Succession Principle (each wave saturating before the next takes over): the percentage split is the operational mechanism that turns a multi-decade vision into a funded, evolving bet portfolio, revisited periodically as bets prove out. See also Margin as Fuel for Future Investment for where the capital funding later waves comes from.
Apply: explicitly assign investment percentages across a spectrum from current core business to speculative future bets, and revisit that split on a regular cadence as evidence comes in, rather than treating the current allocation as fixed.
Google's named instantiation of this pattern, cited by Dan Olsen: split investment 70% core business (targeting ROI within ~12 months), 20% adjacent seeds (revenue expected beyond 12 months), 10% moonshot/experimental work with no expected near-term return. Olsen's observation from consulting is that most companies don't actually run anything close to 70/20/10 — the real, unstated split is closer to 95/5 or even 99/1, with almost nothing reserved for seeds or moonshots. Useful as a diagnostic: map an org's actual initiatives into the three buckets and compare the real ratio to the stated one.
Из тем: Netflix, Consumer Science, and Strategy Storytelling