There are two distinct skills. One is building a great product. That can be done with a tiny team. The other is building a great organization. That obviously cannot be done alone. To me an interesting question is whether we need great organizations. There is a great imperative once you have a great product to grow and scale, to go from being a product builder to being an organization builder. It is undeniable that an outstanding organization allows us to leverage our talents in ways we could not do alone, and I suspect success in the massive monetary sense depends more on an ability to build great organizations than on building great products. But I would like to think building great products is enough, and unless you need massive monetary success I expect it is.
Great organizations are wonderful when they're effective at supporting the product or service. With a startup, it's hard to know the organizational size required because you usually aren't even sure of the size of the market.
Some companies look at early exponential growth, think of it as a nearly-vertical line, and build an organization that thrives on that growth. But at some point the growth will start to flatten, and the organization has horribly overshot the mark by then. If building organizations is hard, pruning them is ten times harder.
