There's some cred that's given to any company that's a "startup". Which is why successful startups do their best to extend the use of that term-- claiming that their culture stays the same. The same way that job titles are being inflated, I think there's "startup inflation".
In one of my college business classes we tried to define a startup, and we ended up with something like:
> A startup is a company that is new company, less than 5 years old, that is also looking for a big payout by trying a risky and novel product or business strategy. A startup is also looking for extremely high growth, which is usually funded by outside investment.
So, github? No longer a startup. A year after you've become successful and paid off the VCs? No longer a startup. If you're a design/development agency? Not ever a startup, because the product/services you're providing are not novel or new territory. If someone made a competitor to Jira, I might also hesitate to call it a startup. At some point these kind of services get commoditized.
Of course, colloquially this definition fails and I don't ever try to push this definition on people. But it helps to conceptually divide the "high-growth new product startups" from the "lifestyle startup" and "traditional business startups".
Holy smokes. I didn't know it was already that large. What are they doing with 600 people that they were unable to do with 30? I haven't seen anything novel come out of there for a long time. Maybe Atom?
Sales, marketing, operations and customer support would all need to add people as the size of your customer base grows, not just as you start adding new functionality.
Seriously though. I toured a startup nearby me and they literally had a massage therapist, barber, therapist, barista, and numerous other service workers employed and working at least 9-5 every day serving the ~50 employees, 30 of which were sales, 10 engineers, and 10 executives.
As far as I could tell nobody used these perks that day. A guy even made his own coffee at his desk.
Unless the company was swimming in cash a la Google or Apple, I would feel weird using services like those. Even if they had the money, I would prefer to just be paid more.
I imagine that due to economies of scale you'd be getting more value out of those services than you would from the equivalent cost to the company in pay. But that's only the case if you actually use the services and you would've paid for them anyways if they weren't provided.
