Is 20 people per company a lot? It's not just a person and some software.
Robokiller for example is a paid service with a business division. You're talking developers, sales teams, support, and everything else that goes with it.
Me too. I was very confused when I heard that number. I was thinking maybe 200 people if they have multiple dev teams and a corporate marketing/sales side for advertising.
My employer has slightly fewer people, but we have dozens of clients with sites/apps far more complex than reddit. It just doesn't make sense.
They are active in more than 600 cities. Even assuming tech support, design, engineering and R&D staff are negligible, 20 employees per city seems to make sense. Partnership, Marketing, legal, operations, vehicle rentals.
Their software might scale and business model replicable across many cities, but they still need people on the ground running.
IMHO 100 people isn't a big company at all... two dozen programmers can still comfortably fit in a room and know eachother. My current company has 200k employees, we spend a large amount of time just looking for whoever is responsible for something...
Besides programmers there is probably a small army of sys admins to handle their data centers in additional to daily operational IT, business development folks working with partners, the entire ad/sales platform, lawyers and accountants. Plus all of the facility staff for that crazy office (kitchen staff, janitorial, gardeners, etc).
I agree though. That is a lot of people and it's hard to wrap my brain around that since I work at a very small software company of less than 10 people.
That's a bit of an oversimplification to be fair. They offer multiple products (esignature, contract lifecycle management). Does not change that it's still a lot of employees.
20 employees wouldn't be completely unreasonable. Not all of them would be straight up coders, of course. Then again, with the traffic numbers he claims, I think he could justify having half the engineering power as someone like Facebook.
You know how sometimes we have those threads where someone asks why Uber has 27,000 employees or why Groupon has a headcount 6000, and then there's and lengthy response elaborating why actually, they need that many.
Well here is Expensify with only 130 employees. And they seem to be thriving. It really makes me wonder why some startups out there have so many people.
Robokiller for example is a paid service with a business division. You're talking developers, sales teams, support, and everything else that goes with it.
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