The comparison of 5 to 1000 is misguided. In the early stages of a company, where you need creative thinking, new ideas, rapid iteration, and are building the

The comparison of 5 to 1000 is misguided. In the early stages of a company, where you need creative thinking, new ideas, rapid iteration, and are building the technical foundations of the company, you need the 5 brilliant engineers, and wouldn't have anything to do with the 1,000. In the later stages of the company, when you have 500 enterprise customers creating support requests and you have internal payroll systems etc., then you need the 1000 engineers. And in technology, if you don't have the 5 at all times, you're on borrowed time. Look at what Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive, and pals did to Nokia.