Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.
That's a cloud subscription away!
With a good idea and good execution teams can be impressively small.
That is massively wrong, and frankly an insulting worldview that a lot of people on HN seem to have.
The secret is that some companies - usually ones focused on a single highly scalable technology product, and that don't need a large sales team for whatever reason - those companies can be small.
The majority of companies are more technically complex, and often a 1,000 person company includes many, many people doing marketing, sales, integrations with clients, etc.
In many companies, tech, whether good or bad, is not the majority of the workforce, nor is it necessarily the "core competency" of the company, even if they are selling technical products! A much bigger deal is often their sales and marketing, their brand, etc.