

Ask HN: What if you kept employee count low? - fooshint

I&#x27;m puzzled as to how startups grow to so many employees. For example, dropbox&#x27;s core product hasn&#x27;t changed much from inception. Why not hire a small core team of 10 engineers and focus on operating the main product?
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fooshint
There are additional risks with hiring more people... you need to find stuff
for them to do, and you end up building things that aren't valuable. At worst,
you make the product worse. Once you've found the main valuable idea that'll
get you most of the value.

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wz3chen
Quip has ~16 elite employees (Co-founder is ex-CTO of Facebook) (October 2014)
([http://www.quora.com/How-many-engineers-work-at-
Quip](http://www.quora.com/How-many-engineers-work-at-Quip)) and a great
product used by many.

