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by k-mcgrady 4505 days ago
>> "a team of 32 engineers (~ $500 million/engineer)"

Only if you consider the other employees worth/value to be $0.

1 comments

An article mentions that Whatsapp spent $0 on user acquisition and marketing. If that's true, then yes, it's around $500 million/engineer.
Even if the company had nonengineers, it doesn't affect the ratio between revenue and engineers. The statistic usually does not imply that engineering is solely responsible for the success. Further, it generally can be hard to determine what portion of revenue is due to engineering versus marketing/sales, since the functions work together in a dependent way to make money.
Good luck creating an app used by so many without having a stellar support team.