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In any online discussion of company sizes, someone must mention the furthest outlier in the history of business.

Instagram

Neither of those (Whatsapp, Instagram were profitable, far from it.

And most companies making billions need thousands of employees, especially software devs need to understand that.

It's apples to oranges comparing different companies with different needs. Some companies may require more non-technical staff for things like legal compliance, or have complex technical requirements that are hidden beneath a simple UI.

Well while this number is not false, it's highly misleading as they had no intent of earning any profit.

And so they outsourced everything to others. Their 2013 expense is $148M for $10M of revenue[1]. They aren't spending $148M on 55 employees for sure. And that doesn't include server cost(which is likely very low due to optimizations).

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...

Erlang