The company accounts [1] break this down a bit, reporting the staff numbers as 123 "builders", 73 "operators" and 40 "pushers".

A slide deck about SoundCloud [2] explains that "builders" are the design, engineering and product teams, "operators" are finance, HR and legal, and "pushers" are the platform, community, content and marketing teams.

[1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h... [2] http://www.slideshare.net/dagrobie/16-months-soundcloud/5-Or...

Those who have to account for their productivity (like devs) are probably in short supply.

Those who do not have to account for their productivity (like managers, accountants, and marketers) are probably in excess.

Microservices.

The word on the streets is that this number is going to drop soon.

The way a startup can become a bloated corporation-like structure here in Europe is a surprisingly fast process.

But that doesn't answer the question of what all these people do! I wouldn't have thought they'd be more than 20 people max. Surely they don't have many developers, or we wouldn't see all these remarks here about how they have not updated their site in years. So what's everyone in such a "bloated corporation-like structure" doing? Filling out TPS reports and sending them to each other to get stamped?

I've worked in a place that built and shipped 3 or 4 product lines: actual physical hardware with software, and did it with fewer than 50 people, most of them on the manufacturing line.

Aren't startups usually corporations ab initio?

Well, they shouldn't gain the bloated-ness of a 40yo bureaucratic corporation that fast, though? At least, that's what all the theories about the way startups should operate are about...

Perhaps it's a variation on Parkinson's Law [1]? "The amount of bloat/bureacracy expands so as to fill the budget available to the company?"

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law