My personal anecdote on this, is the same. I've worked on teams with less than a dozen individuals that produced products that were "better" (for any number of

My personal anecdote on this, is the same. I've worked on teams with less than a dozen individuals that produced products that were "better" (for any number of qualifications) than teams run at large fortune 500 computer companies. And, its not like I was really working any harder than the times I've worked at large companies on their products. Its just that I was producing probably 10x the code/features because the team had such a clear vision of how the product worked that most of us could actually debug a problem without actually looking at the source code. I don't really think that its a particular talent thing either (aka we weren't better than the big companies engineers). I just think that a person who wrote the first version of the code, and spends a couple years polishing it is far more capable of extending and debugging it than someone who walks in from the street. Working with a half dozen people also gives one an intimate look at why decisions were made, and their results. Even a lot of successful products that today have very large teams were initially written by small teams that formed the foundations that continue to this day.