I'm curious as to why they had 94 employees. That seems like an insanely high number for a company that does something pretty basic (not dumping on the product, I like it and have used it in the past). What are all of those people doing?
If you simplify a company enough, every company is "just" "simply" "basic".
examples: * Walmart is the largest employer, but stocking shelves w/ automated checkout is pretty basic.
* USPS, FedEx, UPS DHL basically just deliver packages from one place to another.
In reality a large sales team helps you grow, a large customer support team keeps churn low, a development team creates new products, and a marketing team turns those into sales.
Our solutions are sometimes a bit clunky but our infrastructure is audited yearly by an outside firm and certified to carry banking data through the wireless device we designed and through our network. There is another 15-20 people doing financials, payroll, hr, tech support, sales, marketing, assembly, hardware testing, shipping etc..
We maintain multiple backend interfaces to a bunch of (sometimes old and archaic) bank networks and to our wireless devices as well as multiple front end portals for our users.
It's hard to imagine ever being able to make use of 57000 bodies, but I suppose that's a totally different context. We could use a few more.
Alternatively, a quantitative measure of effectiveness is the company's revenue or net income per employee. For 2015, that's $1.2M / Googler or $264K / Googler, respectively.
Human organizations always scale to accommodate available resources, not required functionality.
I think it's conceivable the reason you don't see much innovation from Twitter for years now, is that they have the organizational equivalent of traffic gridlock. It's simply impossible to get anything done with that many stakeholders.