This exactly. "Efficiency" -- especially the way you measure it if you come from a small-company perspective -- is only one of many metrics. It feels like a rea

This exactly. "Efficiency" -- especially the way you measure it if you come from a small-company perspective -- is only one of many metrics. It feels like a really important one, but there's some perspective distortion at work, in my personal experience as a small-company person who has interacted a lot with big company product teams, executives, and contracting departments. Continuity matters much more than output-per-input-hour at large companies. Here's one way to look at it: big companies are large because they have big revenue streams to protect. Startups don't. So the risk/reward calculations look completely different. There's lots of "overhead" in a big company that can fairly be characterized as "systems that have evolved to protect the existing lines of business." For example, the political infighting at a Fortune 500 company over allocating $1M to new a new product R&D project (as opposed to marketing, or maintenance of existing products, or internal IT spend) is shocking to a startup founder in Silicon Valley who is able to raise a $1M seed round to try out a "good idea" relatively quickly, these days. Why are VCs with $25M funds so much more willing to underwrite product development than Fortune 500 executives with billion-dollar P&Ls? Because the VC's downside is limited to $25M. Here's another way to look at it: you could define "efficiency" as "how often does a company of a given size" go out of business. By that measure, big companies are massively more efficient than small companies. Even factoring in the depredations of private equity investors. :-) (This written by one of the above-mentioned startup founders who has struggled to get funding for new products from big company executives.)