[rileymat2]

I find something about unsourced numbers in this answer and many blog posts uncomfortable. Maybe they are right, but maybe they are just made up to be convincing, but ultimately wrong.

For a while blog posts would include an unsourced hand drawn curve that looked like data to prove their point, but was completely made up

[gumby]

The numbers are just examples. This is a qualitative explanation and it rings true to me.

[rileymat2]

Without data it could be completely false. And the same applies to everything I am saying!

What seems to happen is small companies do not have the same requirements as big companies (and in these companies that aspire to be big fast). I18N, Scaling, Accessibility, Security, the list goes on and on. So they "appear" more productive by feature, but some of that would be dead in the water with the same team with a big customer base or regulatory concerns.

A team of one could write twitter in a weekend (how productive is that!), and it will be fail whales as far as the eyes can see under the same load requirements. (Not modern twitter, the more basic first versions)

It could also be my own bias, but I have never been at a company where the founding team was great technically, maybe that is because I am in the midwest, so it is not ex-googlers with deep technical knowledge. But it has always been a guy who could get barely get the job done or a friend of a friend who could code, but had a great idea/niche.