I have never seen that happen in practice. Can you give an example of a CEO who delivered 100x value to the company you worked for?
- Connections: industry, hires, investors
- Investing themselves into the company (bringing capital to help you grow)
- Domain specific knowledge. Hopefully they know the industry better than anyone.
- Management. Do not underestimate how far good management can go. It can really be a productivity multiplier - but the other way is true, too. If you have bad management, you're going to kill productivity.
Using your parallel, I think it'd be more fair to compare
> CEO + 300 software engineers, sales people, product managers
> 400 software engineers, sales people, product managers in a flat structure
I tend to think that the former would be more efficient, because otherwise we would be seeing at least some organizations of the latter type outcompeting the former on the free market. We don't, with 1-2 exceptions.