Also ex-Alexa in the early years, while that would have helped, I really don't think it was just the tech stage. As we grew it was very hard to work on the core tech at all since we had a bunch of time spent on organization issues and working with people who 1) didn't get how ML worked or pay attention to how the tech is changing (most of the "domain" teams) and wanted to just ship new integrations or demo features and 2) never found a monetization channel which would have allowed for investment into deeper tech (and less senior leadership/exec churn).

Though I also very much agree with the other point of OP that privacy paranoia also blocked development. The privacy team seemed like they would have been most happy if we couldn't ship.