quanticle says it well, but I wanted to add that some things require a scale that's unavailable to "a small bunch of guys". Say, for example, you'd like to cure a disease. Can't be done on the small, as you need various flavors of lab people, slugs of lab hardware and then a number of suits required to get $COUNTRY approval.
You can do this, I guess, with outsourcing (assuming you can protect the IP), but then you need even more $$ to get people to do what you want - doubt they'll work for equity.
In short, there are good large companies and bad large companies (as I suspect they are good/bad small companies and startups). Hunter/gatherer people had no excess capacity, so you died if you couldn't keep up. It's a nicer society when there's sufficient scale to tolerate old, expert or otherwise non-critical path people.
You can do this, I guess, with outsourcing (assuming you can protect the IP), but then you need even more $$ to get people to do what you want - doubt they'll work for equity.
In short, there are good large companies and bad large companies (as I suspect they are good/bad small companies and startups). Hunter/gatherer people had no excess capacity, so you died if you couldn't keep up. It's a nicer society when there's sufficient scale to tolerate old, expert or otherwise non-critical path people.
This goes with life as well as work.