> Software companies have to hire many people because it needs to report growth to investors, headcount is one of the measurement of growth.
I don't think you have a good understanding on how those companies are growing and scaling out. Don't take growth for the granted. "Right product" or "Right technology" won't give you that. It only comes from solving thousands of very specific, never-ending customer problems. If you do B2B, you need to spend most of your time on very specific requests from priority customers. And they are not one, but hundreds of them if you targets $xB business. It's just physically impossible to keep up with a small team even with a very aggressive prioritization.
Still not convinced? Google has a notoriously bad reputation for their customer supports and it's primarily because of their tendency of keeping "inessential headcounts" low as possible. And think about how many cloud customers they lost to AWS and Azure. TK came to GCP and his first work was adding an army of sales and account managers. This almost immediately yielded a rapid acceleration of the platform, although it's too late to catch up.
I don't think you have a good understanding on how those companies are growing and scaling out. Don't take growth for the granted. "Right product" or "Right technology" won't give you that. It only comes from solving thousands of very specific, never-ending customer problems. If you do B2B, you need to spend most of your time on very specific requests from priority customers. And they are not one, but hundreds of them if you targets $xB business. It's just physically impossible to keep up with a small team even with a very aggressive prioritization.
Still not convinced? Google has a notoriously bad reputation for their customer supports and it's primarily because of their tendency of keeping "inessential headcounts" low as possible. And think about how many cloud customers they lost to AWS and Azure. TK came to GCP and his first work was adding an army of sales and account managers. This almost immediately yielded a rapid acceleration of the platform, although it's too late to catch up.