While I agree with the overall sentiment (strongly!) I would posit: The effectiveness of a single hacker (better+cheaper tooling, open source) has scaled much faster than the price of SF rents. You can only afford 2 devs instead of 5 now, but they can get 10x more done
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Hehe, they launched with 1/2 people. It’s 5 people to get to 1 million+ users. That is not common at all.
It's tough to draw direct historical comparisons though, no? The first browser was created by two people. It obviously would not have had a million users, and that's not the metric you're paying attention to when you're trying to zoom out and experiment.
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I’d look at Evernote which is similar, but took an order of magnitude (or 2?) more people to get that far. As for the browser, I suppose I’d say now it would take one and they’d do it in half the time. (If we’re being literal, they’d fork Chromium and be done in an afternoon)
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Of course, I’m amenable to your point. Especially the achievements at PARC seem very hard to “beat” on a person:value ratio. I’d still argue they’d do even better now, though. It would _certainly_ take less capital, of which more you could spend on bay area rent :P
End of conversation
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Anyway — inadvertently or not — I feel like I'm sort of getting baited into arguments about productivity, scaling, etc. when I'm solely intending to point at creativity/generative experimentation. I'm getting a little irritated with myself for not tracking, so I'm clocking out.
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Apologies, not my attempt to bait! Just hard to disentangle the two sometimes.
End of conversation
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