On January 8, 2007, the day before Jobs announced the iPhone, Apple had a market cap of $73.76B (source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/ma

On January 8, 2007, the day before Jobs announced the iPhone, Apple had a market cap of $73.76B (source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/market-cap https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/market-... ) That's not exactly tiny (except if you compare to their $2T today) but it's also not exceptional. There are hundreds of companies of comparable size, including in Europe. And they gained experience producing mobile devices with the iPod released in 2001. I can't say what size company they were back then (my source only goes as far back as $33B in 2005) but certainly they were smaller. So I think it's wrong to say that "A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example." since a small business can become a bigger company releasing innovative products like the iPhone.