The point I was trying to make is what are the situation where an independent small startup can make it big. Your examples are instructive, engineers were able to make id Software big because you didn't need a lot of hardware to invent 3D shooters, but Jobs gets the credit for the iPhone because the engineers needed hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to pull it off.

pg is giving advice based on him getting rich from that period of time where the small startup could make it big. But those conditions are probably rare going forward.