In semiconductor companies, that danger is very real. It's a common practice to license major parts of chips such as the silicon IP for peripherals or even entire processors so the teams that intimately know the system design of an entire family of chips can be very small. If the 20 people on the flight were even half the team working on one of Freescale's products, they could have just lost six months to a year.

If a startup designing silicon lost that many people, it would probably be irrecoverable.