Well especially with the example of Twitter, it started as a small little internal tool inside the company. It was a small project that engineers were just doing in their spare time. So that's one example. Facebook too from what I've read. Facebook was just a little stalking like tool Mark created with his friends for Harvard kids. I'm sure when they started they never saw a real scope outside of that. Both of these small projects grew into large projects, because of their success. What I'm trying to say is that you typically can't set out to create just a small project.

The nterface story was definitely just the next level of luck based co-founders. Although, we really did meet by chance. I probably should have gone into more detail that I did in fact hire Dave and Jason to design/program a small project that I was working on. I contracted them out rather than chose them to be my co-founders. It then evolved into something more.

What I'm stressing more in the article is that luck plays a huge role for first time entrepreneurs: smaller network, less experience, can only find people with similar experience, etc.

Gall's Law: "Any complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galls_law