If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was approached about having my own network many, many years ago. There were some people who wanted to start up a network, and I didn't want to get that involved in the business aspect of it.
It's hard to tell with these Internet startups if they're really interested in building companies or if they're just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don't really want to build a company, they won't luck into it. That's because it's so hard that if you don't have a passion, you'll give up.
In 2000, just before the first dot-com bubble burst, it cost a whopping $5 million to launch a tech startup.
Organizations spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars installing and implementing huge servers, new Web sites and applications. They have to continue to do that, but they also have to clean up the mess of the '90s.
As of 2011, it cost about $5,000 to launch a tech startup.
What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability.
It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.
The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.
Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded.
With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.
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