[specproc]

Heh, I was musing on something I'd read recently that had Kodak as a case study. It was compared with Instagram which had about 10-15 staff when it was bought for USD 1bn. WhatsApp similarly small.

I hear tech can be big employers, maybe I'm overselling my point a bit there. That said, the trend is very much towards smaller operations, and a large headcount is not at all required for large money.

My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.

[kstrauser]

That's a challenging comparison, though, as Instagram never had to do fundamental research. They wrote an app. One that has to scale to enormous traffic, to be sure, but that came after they were a 10-15 person company. Meanwhile, Kodak was inventing lens technology and film chemistry and manufacturing processes and distribution channels.

Similarly, Ford has more employees than Gran Turismo, but they're not in the same industry.

[Melatonic]

To be fair maybe a better comparison would also be all the people maintaining the physical infrastructure Instagram was using (no idea what Cloud provider they originated on)

[throw0101a]

> My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.

This has been true for most industries even 'with-in themselves': it's called productivity growth.

The number of employees (or man-hours) needed to create (say) a tonne of steel has dropped a lot, so where previously you had 'steel towns', now a plant may just have a very few (and produce more tonnage than they've ever done).

[LorenPechtel]

Disagree. It's not a small office worth of staff. You're not counting all the jobs involved in providing the data centers.

[siva7]

Those aren't employees of instagram or whatsapp

[SamBam]

But they're part of its stack. It wouldn't exist without it. And vice versa, AWS wouldn't have as many employees without companies like Instagram.

Kodak required so many because it owned nearly the whole stack.

But that said, we can't just add the number of AWS employees to the number of Instagram employees, because we have to prorate it by the total number of companies that use AWS (or whatever).

[randombits0]

You are describing CraigsList. No ads, no salesmen, just a small staff.