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They stayed true to a single product purpose, did not add frivolous features and experiments, and didn't deal with payments/billing, eventually being "rescued" by VC money? You seem to gloss over that AWS also helps them out a lot already here, by being the load balancer entry points and ordering VMs from a api.

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There's no glossing, I just don't understand. It's also far from my corner of technology.

Still, between 3 devs and thousands, that's 3 orders of magnitude. Let's take the core team and 30x them for a broader project. Add 50 (?) for billing. Another 50 for web apps. Another 30 for general devops? That takes us to a "mere" 220 devs.

Then I read that Uber had around 2,000 SEs in 2020, and Airbnb at some point was 1,200. I don't know how to grok that.

You mention AWS, my impression was that even many very large orgs run their their hardware in the cloud (surely not all but still).

There seems to be a pretty big difference in business logic and requirements between a photo sharing app and one that moves or houses people.

Dealing with payments globally to hosts/drivers and specifically compliance is complex in itself.

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