20 years ago, if you wanted to ship software, or run a web server on the Internet, you needed some amount of capital. I worked at one of the cheaper local Inte

20 years ago, if you wanted to ship software, or run a web server on the Internet, you needed some amount of capital. I worked at one of the cheaper local Internet Service Providers in 1996, and with a 3-year contract we gave you 1 gig of traffic a month on your colocated box at 10 MB port speeds for $540 a month - you provide your own box. Now for $10 a month, Linode provides me with the VPS box, I get 2 TB transfer, 125MB port speed, and the plan is not yearly or monthly or even daily, but hourly. There are two app stores I can put apps out with, with a variety of monetization schemes. I know for Android that over 1 billion people use their Android device at least once a month. There is also the web. There has been an explosion of open source software, and improvements on existing software - Linux, Apache, and MySQL. Or Nginx and MongoDB. Plus free Java application servers, or Python, PHP or Javascript web frameworks. There is Paypal and Stripe. Companies have gone from renting offices to subleasing to co-working to virtual offices. If you can program (or can install software with minimal programming skill and have some creative ideas and will hustle), there has never been a time when fundraising has been less important, because you do not need money to get your product to market. This being the case, worrying about getting a job and layoffs makes less sense. Because nowadays you don't need an office, a shrink-wrapped software deal with computer stores, a handful of leased colo'd servers and IT team to support them. You can start with much less, get to where you're making a minimal living, and then go from there. After that you can take a job, or take seed/VC money if you want, but you don't have to. I have seen this come to pass, and I have heard many luminaries in Silicon Valley say the same thing. Of course, in good times it is less work and easier to get a job making low 6 figures programming, than it is to make $30k a year on your own bootstrapped business, never mind pushing that up to where it grows to $100k. It is a lot of work, as many have said. It is doable like never before though.