The question isn't whether you need to be a big company or not, it's where you're gonna get the money.
What you'd need to host/deliver something like Docs/Sheets is: a product team (2 QE, 8 SWEng, 3 SRE, 1 product owner), the product, some cloud infrastructure, and the capital to pay for it. You could go larger than that to build it, but that is plenty of people to run/maintain/support it. Assuming "large scale" is between 1M and 100M users, figure between $750K and $3M for infra. Combine that with median salaries for employees, and you're lookin' at between $1.75M and $4M (before taxes/business fees).
If you use the cheapest infrastructure and labor, you could do it for $500K. (it is mind-blowing how cheap offshore labor is. Google engineers get paid almost 8 times what some of our contractors get paid, for about the same work)
VCs throw that much cash around for a weekend trip to French vineyards. If you can actually get paying customers, even better.
What you'd need to host/deliver something like Docs/Sheets is: a product team (2 QE, 8 SWEng, 3 SRE, 1 product owner), the product, some cloud infrastructure, and the capital to pay for it. You could go larger than that to build it, but that is plenty of people to run/maintain/support it. Assuming "large scale" is between 1M and 100M users, figure between $750K and $3M for infra. Combine that with median salaries for employees, and you're lookin' at between $1.75M and $4M (before taxes/business fees).
If you use the cheapest infrastructure and labor, you could do it for $500K. (it is mind-blowing how cheap offshore labor is. Google engineers get paid almost 8 times what some of our contractors get paid, for about the same work)
VCs throw that much cash around for a weekend trip to French vineyards. If you can actually get paying customers, even better.