Startup Opportunities, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 2The Democratization of Startups

Now is an amazing time to be an entrepreneur. Startup communities are being built all over the world. You don’t need significant capital to start a new business. Knowledge about how to start and scale companies is more prevalent than ever.

Twenty years ago, the Internet was starting to be used in a commercial way. Today, an entire generation has grown up net native, and people are living their lives online and unaware of a time when the world wasn’t interconnected by technology. The rapid change and increased availability of technology has radically impacted how companies are started and built. The dynamics around barriers to entry, especially in businesses that have constraints around communication and distribution, have shifted in favor of startups.

This applies no matter where you are located—from Silicon Valley to Berlin, from New York City to Iowa City. The emergence of concepts like the sharing economy, the growth of smartphone use and the accompanying app explosion, and the interconnectedness of many business functions are democratizing the ability to start a new company.

The Cost to Launch Is Approaching Zero

In the dot-com boom (1996–2001) software companies needed several million dollars of funding to buy equipment just to get started. There was no Google to help attract users, there was no PayPal to make payments frictionless, there was no AWS (Amazon Web Services) to remotely host your application, and there was no Shopify ...