If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could reap the rewards.
This kind of reply isn't really that constructive, the guy raised some fair points... A lot of smaller companies and startups seem to do incredibly well with not even 10 employees, let alone 50. I understand there's more to running a company than meets the eye, but I really do wonder if all 50 people spend their days at vine being productive.
Please name a company of 10 people that manages a user base in the tens of millions with similar technical requirements as Vine (bandwidth, storage, etc). If such a company exists I believe it would be an outlier.
Are you really so blinded by free-market ideology that you think one company having bloated headcount makes room for a direct competitor in their product space? You believe in a perfectly efficient market and don't believe in the existence of barriers to entry?
But this isn't one bloated company - this is a normal size and ratio of folks for this type of product. There will always be outliers - and in particular extremely small teams that can have outsized success, just as you'll also see behemoths not doing much (e.g. monster.com, 4,000 employees).
My point is that your sarcasm was laughably bad. You came off like you genuinely believe that any perceived weakness makes room for a new company. Which is something people genuinely believe on this website.
If you want to make an effective point with sarcasm, you need to stay a bit more grounded.
Based on what PeCaN said, it seems he/she thinks that Vine is an anomaly, and uses a vast amount of resources compared to what is required.
I believe they are perfectly normal, and if anything are slightly on the leaner side of average.
If PeCaN is right, and I'm wrong, then he/she should be starting a company much more efficient than the average, and benefiting from being that much more effective than his/her competition. There are plenty of opportunities out there - if someone like Vine is bloated, then surely PeCaN could be a consultant and not deal with barriers to entry, and still be wildly successful. There was no sarcasm.
For what it's worth… I /do/ work for a very efficient company, and benefit from it relative to our competition.
I'm not personally interested in Silicon Valley brogramming for social video sharing sites, but thanks for your confidence that I could dominate the market.
