The issue I have with this view is that unless you have people on your team with fundamental, "core CS" capability, creating a behemoth like Skype or Snap just

The issue I have with this view is that unless you have people on your team with fundamental, "core CS" capability, creating a behemoth like Skype or Snap just isn't possible. Of course, there's a balance, and who knows, maybe it's Pareto with 80% of the team focused on engineering and 20% focused on math/CS/R&D. The monetary gains the market sees are the direct result of clever math and CS, not bolt-on solutions that can be lifted from libraries on GitHub.