Good question. For Paul Graham it certainly worked.<p>By combining a great team of competant people, a small startup environement were you can concentrate on getting thing done and by using powerfull tools they made their software, managed to have it evolving faster than their competitor and then sold it to Yahoo.<p>Ironically since the tool has been brought back by Yahoo its growth stopped and nobody know of it anymore. Is it because of the different people working on it? Is it because they had now a different management structured that cared more of politics? Or was it because they decided to recode everything in C++ ?<p>To me that&#x27;s likely a combination of all the things.<p>That&#x27;s the key point. A great programming language and echosystem is a great start. But that&#x27;s not enough. You also need pragmatic management that make decision for the good of the company and not for politics and you need to have employees that care of their job.<p>At the end, you should know if you are in a model of small efficiant teams or huge average teams. Most company start with the former and end up in the later as they grow. Ultimately that why the next start up has a possibility to beat them. You would never be able to beat microsoft if everybody inside had a startuper mind-set. They would own the world.<p>That why people fear google so much. I&#x27;am pretty sure they have lot of politics and are already more in the later phase than the former but they at least managed to keep bright people working for them.