[nostrademons]

Pretty much, yeah. The first startup I worked at (corporate remote access) had half a dozen different services that a request touched before a connection could be established. The second (financial software) also had half a dozen to a dozen. The one I founded (casual game creation) had 4 different independent systems interacting, and never got to the point where it was productionized (I killed it because the prototypes indicated it wasn't a compelling business idea).

Google, of course, is in a class way above all those. I'm not sure if anyone actually knows how many services a single search hits now - perhaps some of the old-timers who're now VP level or above in search. The last public figures I was aware of were "hundreds of distinct services spread across tens of thousands of machines".

Most startups that actually do something useful require far more than a web frontend and a database.