alt Hacker News300 people isn’t “extremely small” for a company. I don’t work with/for companies over 100 people, for example, and those are already quite big.
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300 people running Steam, creating games and maintaining Steam Deck / Linux and stuff?
Yes, 300 is quite small.
I think a better way to think of it is in terms of revenue per employee. Valve is WAY up there.
the implied observation is that valve is extremely small relative to what it does and how big most people would expect it to be
Of course smaller companies exist — there are 1 person companies! But in a world where many tech companies have 50,000+ employees, 300 is much closer to 100 or 10 and they can all be considered small.
And then you consider it in context: a company with huge impact, brand recognition, and revenue (about $50M/employee in 2025). They’ve remained extremely small compared to how big they could grow.
300 is extremely small for a company of their size in terms of revenue and impact. Linus media group and their other companies for instance is over 100 people, and is much smaller in impact and revenue than a company like valve, despite not being far off the number of employers (within an order of magnitude)...