I think the difference might be that you knew what you wanted to build. That's usually the bigger issue in projects like this.
The other thing I can think of is that small teams or individuals can often outpace larger teams, at least when it comes to pure software development - in practice, a team handles things like 3rd party integrations, customer feedback, stakeholder management, demos, etc as well.
When I interviewed with Uber, I met an engineer who had worked for Page @ Kitty Hawk directly before joining Otto (which as we know got acquired immediately by Uber). I don't know that I really have a point, except I found it interesting to hear first-hand about another "Alphabet" (technically page's non-alphabet venture) crossover to Uber.
At a recent job, my option grant wasn't official until approved at the next quarterly board meeting. There was about 2 months delay (but it also didn't impact me as it wasn't between any "material events").
The reactive form framework built into angular is everything I wish I had when working on an angularjs application.
I'm working on a new project in angular and I'm very impressed with the built-in routing support. Also, I wasn't a big fan of using rxjs Observables everywhere at first, but they are now my favorite thing about writing javascript.
I'm really looking forward to taking advantage of the service worker support as well.
There were some rough edges, but it only took me a few days of hacking to get it working. Thankfully, the ecosystem is much better today