Speaking purely from the dev side, a competent 5-person team could probably build 95% of Spotify’s current functionality in 2-3 years. Of course there are many

Speaking purely from the dev side, a competent 5-person team could probably build 95% of Spotify’s current functionality in 2-3 years. Of course there are many other necessary nontechnical roles that would be unfilled (legal, business development, etc). It’s no secret that companies tend to scale their workforce exponentially in exchange for logarithmic gains in their core product.