the capital required to start a profitable business is orders of magnitude lower than ever before.
Disagree. It's cheaper than it was in 1997 or 1967, sure, but I don't think it's cheaper than "ever before". For one thing, time is becoming more expensive, if one looks at costs like rent, health insurance, long-term career opportunity cost, and business risk (competitors advancing, unexpected change) imposed by the passage of time. Desirable real estate is insanely expensive, and that drives up everything, especially the cost of hiring people. Cities in which VC is an option are especially expensive: rent alone is more than many people make after taxes.
It's easier to build a CRUD-app than a chip factory, for sure, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. The right comparison might be a restaurant or a gas station in an area with extremely low real estate costs and regulatory overhead... in a time like 1928, when startup costs for brick-and-mortar businesses were very low by today's standards.
The percentage of people who can reliably start a business at scale X for various values of X has changed, but not a whole lot, over the past 100 years. What has changed in the scale range for internet businesses; businesses at smaller X's can now be delivered over the internet, which wasn't the case 20 years ago.
Disagree. It's cheaper than it was in 1997 or 1967, sure, but I don't think it's cheaper than "ever before". For one thing, time is becoming more expensive, if one looks at costs like rent, health insurance, long-term career opportunity cost, and business risk (competitors advancing, unexpected change) imposed by the passage of time. Desirable real estate is insanely expensive, and that drives up everything, especially the cost of hiring people. Cities in which VC is an option are especially expensive: rent alone is more than many people make after taxes.
It's easier to build a CRUD-app than a chip factory, for sure, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. The right comparison might be a restaurant or a gas station in an area with extremely low real estate costs and regulatory overhead... in a time like 1928, when startup costs for brick-and-mortar businesses were very low by today's standards.
The percentage of people who can reliably start a business at scale X for various values of X has changed, but not a whole lot, over the past 100 years. What has changed in the scale range for internet businesses; businesses at smaller X's can now be delivered over the internet, which wasn't the case 20 years ago.