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Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very ni
by ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.
- WJW 1y agoDon't fall for the lottery winner bias. Some companies just strike it rich, often for reasons entirely outside their control. That doesn't mean that copying their methods will lead to the same results.
- ghaff 1y agoAnd for enterprise sales, you need a salesforce and many multi-billion companies have an enterprise salesforce. And documentation writers, and support staff, in multiple geographies, and events/marketing teams to support customers, etc.
- Terr_ 1y agoIn comic form: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
- sien 1y agoYouTube had fewer than 70 employees when Google bought them in 2006. With a good idea and good execution teams can be impressively small.
- edanm 1y ago> The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have. That is massively wrong, and frankly an insulting worldview that a lot of people on HN seem to have. The secret is that some companies - usually ones focused on a single highly scalable technology product, and that don't need a large sales team for whatever reason - those companies can be small. The majority of companies are more technically complex, and often a 1,000 person company includes many, many people doing marketing, sales, integrations with clients, etc.
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoI have worked for many companies and the majority of them are not technically complex. They are drowning in tech debt from when they were in a high growth phase and many of the employees they have are due to needing to handle that debt but the product itself is technically very simple.
- edanm 1y agoWhich doesn't make my point wrong. In many companies, tech, whether good or bad, is not the majority of the workforce, nor is it necessarily the "core competency" of the company, even if they are selling technical products! A much bigger deal is often their sales and marketing, their brand, etc.