A lot of hard problems actually become harder with more people. Now you are not only dealing with the problem itself but also with the problem of getting people

A lot of hard problems actually become harder with more people. Now you are not only dealing with the problem itself but also with the problem of getting people to agree your solutions are worth the trouble. Cat herding is much harder than innovation. I've built a few products with a skeleton team. You can move really quickly on a lot of issues if you have the right people. And let's face it, a lot of successful companies are not exactly rocket science in terms of what they come up with. Slack: middle of the road chat thingy. Their UX is nice and cute but otherwise there isn't a whole lot of special stuff going on. There are a gazillion alternatives that do more or less the same thing. Airbnb. Cute idea but it's a glorified market place. Twitter has some interesting tech related to scaling search but otherwise it's basically a fast version of mastodon, which is community supported. And they weren't all that fast or scalable initially (fail whale?!). There are a lot of tech companies where the tech is pretty middle of the road. A lot of these companies actually established themselves with much smaller teams than they currently have. My theory is that they actually could not have done it with a bigger team. You need a small and focused team to get results. That's why startups are a thing. Large companies with way more resources struggle to do the same things that small, nimble teams of less than 10 people accomplish. A lot of these big companies established themselves before they bloated their teams; not after. Google was a handful of graduate students that built a nice search engine and ran circles around their competition. They were smart, not big. To move quickly, you need a good team that is not burdened by design by committee style management. Google seems paralyzed lately actually. I'm not sure they'd be able to build another search engine. Plenty of talent and money but their ability to focus all that on anything has gone down the drain.