Neither craigslist nor POF generates 7 billion in revenue. Latest number I can find for craigslist is around 700m in 2016, let’s assume it’s 1b now. And let’s assume they have 1 employee. You don’t think hiring an additional 10k employees to get an extra 6b in revenue is worth it?
CL has approx 50 employees, operate around the globe and are on track to do in excess of 1b in revenue this year... So I disagree with your assessment.
There are many businesses that operate in the 10figure range that dont require 10's of thousands of employees.
To me LI is more indicative of bloat. Especially since they are owned by MSFT.
Yes but can they scale to 7B with 50 employees? And specifically can they run a business like LinkedIn with 50 (or 500 or whatever small number) employees.
I would argue the answer is no. If CL has a way to scale to that kind of revenue you'd think they would be doing it. One possible answer is the business they run just doesn't scale like that regardless of how many employees they have so it's better to keep things lean.
I'm all for running a lean business, and there are certainly plenty of examples. CL, Stack overflow, POF etc, and they have impressive revenue to employee ratios. But they don't necessarily scale linearly, and they don't have to. CL has 20m revenue per employee, that's impressive. But they likely won't be able to carry that ratio up to 10b in revenue. They also don't need to. The additional employee just need to bring more revenue than they cost.
If someone knows how to run a multi billion dollar global business with 50 people (and more specifically if they know how to do it with linkedin), there will be plenty of people lining up to talk with them and giving them money to do it.
