The era of Big Tech moonshots is over. Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are pulling back on ambitious, risky long-term projects after many of them failed

• Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have scaled back their ambitious “moonshot” projects.
• Moonshots like Google X and Amazon Grand Challenge allowed tech firms to build innovative projects.
• But many of these projects have shuttered or cut staff as companies focus on generating revenue.

During a rare internal fireside chat in March, Babak Parviz, an Amazon vice president, praised the CEO, Andy Jassy, as his mentor for making his team think harder about the financial viability of its projects.

Parviz led Grand Challenge, Amazon’s in-house skunkworks lab, created in 2014. Before Amazon, Parviz led a similar team at Google called Google X.

“Poor Andy has been trying to make me a better businessperson,” Parviz said at the event, a recording of which Insider obtained. “I’m not sure how much he has succeeded, but he’s been trying to turn this engineer into someone who can also think about business issues in a deeper way.”