Q: How come companies such as Skype, Instagram or Whatsapp were built by a small

set of engineers? Skype had a team of 27 when they got acquired. Instagram had 13.
Whatsapp had 32 Engineers and 55 employees when they were acquired by Facebook and
had a whopping 900mn people using the service. Gmail for eg, is still managed by a
team of 100 (engineers).

In contrast, look at the Indian Ecosystem today. Practo has 2000 employees (150 of
which were laid off in the recent appraisal process). Freshdesk is at about 900
employees and growing fast.. As of 2016, Flipkart had 30,000 employees.

SaaS unlike pure products like Gmail or Skype have a different sales and support
process. Q: are these numbers justified? If the way a team put together to bring a
startup vision to life in India is somehow different, and the talent varies, then
we all need to keep that in mind.

Salesforce a 6.6$bn revenue company has 19,000 people working for it. Zoho, 300mn+
USD revenue company has 1200 people working for it. if we do a employee:revenue
extrapolation (though it isnt necessarily accurate), Freshdesk would have approx
90,000 people when it does the revenue that SalesForce does. Zoho will have 24,000
people.