[steviesands]

If your goal is maintenance mode for the company, milk profits for 10 years, and to be eventually replaced by competitors then I think you can run a company very slim. The other question would be, if you have captured a large market share (100s of M/yr to Billions in revenue), how many employees do you need to prevent an upstart from overtaking you through improved tech, product, or strategy?

For example, if FB never invested in ML they would have had even larger margins (fewer GPUs and ML engineers), but now that investment may pay off by fending off tiktok through copycat products and also rebuilding ad attribution after ATT. To complicate matters, before it happens, you don't know in what area your competitor will arise (ML? Product? Paradigm shift?). Similar examples with Google vs. OpenAI, ~2010s Kubernetes wars between cloud providers, Snap vs. FB/Twitter, etc.

[shadowtree]

If you compete with startups with tens of employees - shouldn't you use tens of employees to counter their strategies too?

Do you need endless hanger ons in HR, PR, all kinds of non-producing departments?

Crappy CEOs, which is not the same as a crappy founder, have grown companies without any sense and purpose. Daniel is a great founder and rode great luck. But, he should have been replaced with a Eric Schmidt operator figure a while ago.

I think the founder clings to company forever is coming to an end, in most cases going public should mean a new CEO.