I think it's an issue of industry maturity, too. Let's say you want to open a restaurant. Now sure, you could go out, start a farm, open a steel mill and a min

I think it's an issue of industry maturity, too. Let's say you want to open a restaurant. Now sure, you could go out, start a farm, open a steel mill and a mine to make all your knives and cutlery yourself, cut down timber and construct the entire building yourself, make your own furniture, etc. Really, you could do all of those things. And I think that's the state of the software world, about 10 years ago. Hell, maybe even today, compared to 10 years from now. These days, we're rapidly moving to a world where probably 95% of what a typical company needs -- code hosting, scaled relational storage, execution grids a la Docker on ECS, load balancers, A/B testing, SMS infrastructure, feature flags, etc. can be bought off the shelf, for a fraction of what it would cost to do yourself, and at much higher quality than a single individual could do. It's a natural outgrowth of the increase in developer salaries, in fact, the two go hand-in-hand: labor productivity is up a lot because of these tools, and the incentive to buy cheap off-the-shelf stuff is higher than ever, vs. paying for expensive, scarce, flighty developer labor. I do wonder what this means about starting companies, though. I think software will increasingly move toward an industry where, like owning a Burger King, you have to raise capital (rather than just doing everything yourself) because so much of what you need has to be bought, and peoples' standards are so high. And yet, it is more optimal to have to raise capital, because anyone can get money; not everyone has the skills/talent/know-how to build complicated software. Buying is less risky than building. No longer is it enough to home-roll a webserver: now you need to launch from day 1 with a native mobile app on multiple platforms, everything has to work on any size of display, it all has to be bug-free, high-design, autocomplete-text-boxed, perfection, from day 1. This whole "it's getting so cheap to ship a v1" is malarkey, IMO.