Comment by PlanksVariable
1 day ago
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 companies exist doesn’t change that.
For context, 300 people is substantially larger than the median company headcount in Germany, which is the largest economy in the EU.
You certainly seem to be arguing just to argue. You’re comparing Valve to the companies you choose to work for or the median German company, but those are irrelevant. You’re using the wrong reference set.
Valve is a global, revenue-dominant, platform-level technology company. In its category, 300 employees is extremely small.
Valve is not a German company, so that’s an odd context, but if you want to use Germany for reference, here are the five German companies with the closest revenue to Valve’s:
- Infineon Technologies, $16.4B revenue, 57,000 employees
- Evonik Industries, $16B, 31,930 employees
- Covestro, $15.2B, 17,520 employees
- Commerzbank, $14.6B, 39,000 employees
- Zalando, $12.9B, 15,793 employees
Would you say a country of 300 people isn't small?
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"