He sounds like the clients I have who expect a single engineer to make Amazon and Netflix in a day
Which actually
does happen sometimes (
kind of), where lightning strikes one person to create an instant miracle ... but then, that person needs a shitload of team engineers and producers/PMs and accountants and lawyers and all those people to actually make that spark stay ablaze as a long-burning fire. Ideas come easy, but execution and stability and expansion, that's endless work.
The first couple 'hackdays' you go through at a new job, (where brand new creations get built in one irregular sprint, sometimes with genius and bewildering results,) you wonder why departments aren't always just doing hackdays every single day instead of the regular shit that takes weeks and months and tons of people to produce. But then you realize that most of those ideas had been brewing for a while, and also that it took the 10,000 hours of practice to come up with the masterpiece. And also you work with a hacked-out project, and it looks great on the surface, maybe it's super functional for what it's supposed to do, but expanding on it or having somebody else learn how to use/maintain it in a handoff, that's not so easy because there's not much documentation and nobody else collaborated on it and it wasn't built to scale.
Inside a big company, you feel like the whole thing moves in such slow motion that you sometimes can't tell if it's going anywhere.
In a tiny company, you're having to get out and push so hard against every little obstacle in your path that you wonder every time if you'll be able to ever get moving again and if you will find the energy to actually get where you're going*.
Success is never easy or guaranteed. There's no one formula for success. Gotta just keep moving towards it with whatever method works best for that project.
(*And BTW, this thread keeps listing a lot of the little-big success stories and saying, "See? They did it, why can't everybody?", but for the vast, vast, vast majority of tiny companies, they unfortunately will fail to get there or will find no rewards when they arrive.)