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.
• Now, many of these projects have shuttered or cut staff, as companies focus on generating revenue.

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

Parviz led Grand Challenge, Amazon’s own 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 business person. 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,” Parviz said at the event, a recording of which was obtained by Insider.