Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> many tech companies have 50,000+ employees There are not many tech companies with 50k+ employees, as a point of fact. I’m not arguing just to argue - 300 people isn’t small by any measure. It’s absolutely not “extremely small” as was claimed. It’s not relatively small, it’s not “small for what they are doing”, it’s just not small at all. 300 people is a large company. The fact that a very small number of ultrahuge…
Big, small, etc. are relative terms. There is no way to decide whether or not 300 is small without implicitly saying what it's small relative to. In context, it was obvious that the point being made was "valve is too small to have direct employees working on things other than the core business"