I think it's about more than just efficiencies of scale. You kinda play by different rules at a certain scale (not just based on employee count, also based on r

I think it's about more than just efficiencies of scale. You kinda play by different rules at a certain scale (not just based on employee count, also based on revenue), and suddenly you're subject to a lot more regulatory scrutiny. Plus, as a company becomes more valuable and attracts shareholders and managers with lower appetite for risk, a lot of money needs to be poured into risk management and avoidance. At a previous company, a competitor was blatantly breaking the law to solve user needs we couldn't solve without breaking it as well. Somehow they got away with it, presumably because they were tiny and (to my knowledge) unprofitable. Now, if it wasn't for all that, there's still the problem that, from personal experience, most employees don't invest as much energy as a founder would - which is perfectly understandable. As the founder to employee ratio gets smaller, you find yourself hiring three people to do a job you could do yourself, just to make sure it gets done reliably and timely. In a smaller startup, early hires are more similar to founders because they're close to them and stand to gain a lot if the company succeeds and grows. For employee #213, they sell 40 hours of work per week and their fixed salary is all they really stand to get out of it. So while I like the romantic idea of having a large company comprised of multiple independent startups, I haven't seen that work and I can barely picture it work :( One can get somewhat close to this with the right organisational structure (e.g. sacrificing efficiencies of scale for team autonomy where feasible), but it's not even close to the same thing.