[petra]

It kinds of depends what your goals are: if your goals are to make a card game? sure, a small team should suffice.

But if your goals are to make rockets ? well having 500+ employees and having your product fail, as it happen to spaceX in 2008, maybe not so bad ?

And it could be that for theranos, in order to sell laboratory services(assuming their competitors bundle stuff), they have to offer the whole service array , meaning thousands of tests, so it takes a lot of work for their core product - altough they did already have product based on the same tech for pharma r&d.