Ask HN: Sustainable success with very small head count

Today there a link to an article by PG about bosses which made some interesting statements about organization size [1]. I have started startups before and have often grown them and grown them because it was the "right" thing to do. It makes good business sense to grow employees because it strengthens the business and grows revenue, or so my thought process went. And in reality both start ups did quite well so it must be somewhat true. They were both purchased by much larger companies for sizable sums of money.

But I have often thought the innovation was reduced the bigger and more secure the company became. And it did. But I would justify this by saying we have now proven the market and we are in the "growth" phase rather than the "innovative" phase.

Is it possible to build a long term sustainable, innovative, technically business but keep the employee count exceptionally low. For example, can it stay at 8 employees indefinitely?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html