Does anyone have a theory on what enabled Instagram to get to 27m users with only 13 employees in 2012, and why that still seems very difficult today despite all the SASS products helping startups?

Some game companies also used to release a new game monthly in the 90s, without code completion, Copilot, Git, Github!

gigameshmusic.com | formerly @optimism, @soundxyz, @farther

BEING EARLY! 
Being 1st in many cases.

Long very sad story in 1997 I was getting 10,000+ people a day to my website for free by just posting on usenet newsgroups & "SEO".

I got my first .com in 1994 when they were FREE. 

Don't like to think about it, but I think I was sub 10k .com name worldwide.

I do remember sitting in my college apartment looking to buy whitehouse.com in 1997. I missed it by a month. Cost the guy $70 and he made $500,000+ a year just pointing it to a porn site and getting a percent. If he would have setup his own he would have made $5-10million a year from $70.