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Because alone you can't leverage a network effect. If you decided to start a new venture and persuaded 9 colleagues to join you, you'd probably make more than 10x the income.

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It is hard for me to imagine how ten engineers would easily get a new venture to $3M yearly revenue within a short timespan.

That would be a very lucky outcome, I agree. But it's not so hard to imagine that 10 engineers could produce something that looked impressive enough to investors to throw $25 million at the idea and tell them to pay themselves $3m a year and hire 20 more at a somewhat lesser sum, in the expectation that they would be very profitable a few years later.

Even with one of the most common software businesses, software consulting, you could reach this amount with 10 people in a fairly straightforward fashion.

10 software engineers at say a salary of $100,000 a year. Consulting rate at 3x would be $3M a year.

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