&quot;You are talking about either business complexity or the critical minimum amount of money that is necessary to enter and dominate a market. I am taking about the engineering complexity.&quot;<p>Nope, I&#x27;m talking about engineering complexity.<p>&quot;I could create Facebook in a weekend!&quot; became such a recurring post on HN that posts about how you really couldn&#x27;t became cliche, too. Seriously, yes, these &quot;unicorns&quot; really are doing really hard work. In another 30 years maybe you&#x27;ll be able to turn a crank and produce a unicorn-scale codebase, but we definitely are not there today. Even in the last 5 years a lot of tools have come out to make it noticeably easier.<p>(Note how I said &quot;hard&quot; work. Whether or not it&#x27;s <i>valuable</i> is an entirely different discussion. Hate the unicorns all you want, it doesn&#x27;t make them any easier to engineer. I suspect you may be falling for the &quot;I don&#x27;t like X so X must have every negative quality&quot; cognitive trap.)