I have received conflicting advice from various respected sources on ideal team size. During my time at Amazon, frugality and the inability to acquire and retai

I have received conflicting advice from various respected sources on ideal team size. During my time at Amazon, frugality and the inability to acquire and retain talent kept my team small with open reqs the entire time I was there. On the opposite end, I was in charge of product of a Hollywood studio backed venture that went seeking additional capital from Sand Hill Road VCs. A combination of clout and curiosity got us meetings with a lot of top names. At a meeting with Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla asked if our whole team was the meeting. Around the table was myself, our COO, our CTO, the very famous head of the studio, our CFO, our head of cloud and a couple of engineers. Our COO proudly said "Why no, there are 35 more employees back in Los Angeles. Vinod told him that our head count was about 35 too many and went on to explain his reasoning. I received some very good wisdom, but sadly the advice wasn't taken and the discussion on the private jet back to LA was about why our actual head count was too small and why Khosla was wrong. The company was eventually acquired by Yahoo, which perhaps was a fitting fate for not taking some good advice.