Whatsapp was <50 people when it got acquired for ~$19bn and they had the ability to turn on $150million in revenue at the drop of a hat.

It's interesting people are talking about bloated software in this thread and their love of lean software. Large teams often lead to bloated software.

On an internet with billions of users online, there's a legit argument that most if not all technology companies are severely bloated.

Bandcamp has (or had) 118 people. Their business is music, not a chat app, so it will have different needs, both technical and non-technical. Maybe their engineering team is slightly larger than WhatsApp, but not by orders of magnitude.

Now maybe their business model was flawed (I heard it was profitable, but perhaps not profitable enough). But otherwise 118 people for a global brand-recognized business is pretty lean already: I have worked for medium sized businesses around the same headcount you have never heard of, which don't even operate outside their home country.

It’s all about the evaluation chart you take. It’s easy to pick random criteria to justify any of the following claim. Humanity is bloated. Mammals are bloated. Multi-cellular organisms are bloated. Eucaryote are bloated. Life is bloated.

Salary to ARR is only one metric for bloat. but yeah, absent that, as I said, it's some guess work.