Pretty sure the $15 million referred to a long-term bet, that takes years to get through the burning cash phase and into profitability.
If you hire 20 people for the first year, that's going to cost three million dollars (if you're lucky) for everything all-in, without calculating potentially high customer acquisition costs early on.
Writing the calendar app is the least expensive, least difficult and least time consuming part of building a large scale business around it.
If you wanted to go big, and had three years to do it, you could easily burn through $10 or $15 million trying to get there before generating your first quarterly profit.
If you hire 20 people for the first year, that's going to cost three million dollars (if you're lucky) for everything all-in, without calculating potentially high customer acquisition costs early on.
Writing the calendar app is the least expensive, least difficult and least time consuming part of building a large scale business around it.
If you wanted to go big, and had three years to do it, you could easily burn through $10 or $15 million trying to get there before generating your first quarterly profit.