Your examples are all massive companies—for a Series A startup, the fully-loaded "cost" of an employee is probably closer to $200K per year. For a startup that's just raised seed capital, it's probably around $10K per month.
Well yeah, you hear of founder-only companies fresh off their first round sharing a cheap apartment and taking almost nothing for salary to get things off the ground.
The FBR for a Jr. Dev (maybe employee #1 or 2) obviously isn't going to be $250k/yr.
At those really low head counts, things really do look different, I agree. But it's like saying growing sales from 1-to-2 units is a doubling in growth. At small scale, everything looks weird. However, once you hit ~10 people the numbers start to line up and they tend to hold even through 100,000 person companies.
It's kind of amazing actually, if you run a company with >10 employees, look at your yearly costs divided by employees. I can almost guarantee that if that number is <$250k/employee/year you're feeling uncomfortable and stressed out month-to-month and if it's >= $250k/employee/year you're feeling like you're growing.
This is important because, unless you've decided to run a lifestyle business and not grow your headcount, you're going to have to keep an eye on this number as a target to sustain. If you can hit it year after year you can stay alive and grow.
Yeah the money has to come from somewhere, if it's not coming from sales, it's coming from VC money.
