Programming was rarely the barrier to building these types of companies.
I know software people don't want to accept that, but it's almost always something on the business or administrative/management side of things.
Even for the programming bits, if your initial programmers suck (for some reason) but you have money, a great management team would just replace them with better programmers and fix the code mess with their help. So even that isn't a programming problem, it's a management problem.
And let's look at Twitter, who had atrocious code early on (fail whale galore), yet managed to make a profitable business due to amazing product market fit, despite management incompetence.
Companies just need to pass a code quality bar which is much, much, much lower than the bar programmers set.
I know software people don't want to accept that, but it's almost always something on the business or administrative/management side of things.
Even for the programming bits, if your initial programmers suck (for some reason) but you have money, a great management team would just replace them with better programmers and fix the code mess with their help. So even that isn't a programming problem, it's a management problem.
And let's look at Twitter, who had atrocious code early on (fail whale galore), yet managed to make a profitable business due to amazing product market fit, despite management incompetence.
Companies just need to pass a code quality bar which is much, much, much lower than the bar programmers set.