> not a big company piling gobs of money into a full-time team Think this is a bit of a straw man, to be honest. I've done turns at AWS, Microsoft, Dropbox, an

> not a big company piling gobs of money into a full-time team Think this is a bit of a straw man, to be honest. I've done turns at AWS, Microsoft, Dropbox, and now a quant fund. Most of the big-impact projects at all of these places have been bottom-up initiatives, not top-down -- they've been things started by one or a couple people, wedged into spare time, because the existing ecosystem had gaps. Even things that turn into full-fledged, public-facing services usually start quite small. A former teammate at AWS was part of the team who launched Mac on EC2 -- he was the third engineer on the team, and he started on the project as a part-time engineer on loan from another team. In my experience, this is how things are usually built -- even for things that go on to be part of the re:Invent keynote.