This is probably due to engineer's bias. We like to look at something like Amazon and think "I could build that". It's just a shopping site? A business person

This is probably due to engineer's bias. We like to look at something like Amazon and think "I could build that". It's just a shopping site? A business person would know all of the things you are talking about that make that e-commerce site as successful as it is. I have stumbled across many existing companies that do things that I have thought about developing but they employ 2 people, have no marketing and no-one knows about them. That said, I also agree that there is a weird exponential growth of team size with a product that isn't always much bigger. Our SaaS company turns over about 3M/year with a dev team of 6. I was looking at another similar company the other day (granted slightly bigger/more complicated but only 2 main products) and they had about 200 devs in their about page!