This is true -- I feel like the author has forgotten just how expensive it was to acquire hardware and software back in those days. You could easily blow half a

This is true -- I feel like the author has forgotten just how expensive it was to acquire hardware and software back in those days. You could easily blow half a million to a million on gear and licenses for a solution that today we would implement for pennies on the compute hour with open-source software. Even a low-end dev server would set you back north of $25K, to say nothing of other costs, such as provisioning T3s for the office when dialup was still the norm. (And traffic costs for sites of even modest size were a real concern.) While it was cheap to get into the game at an individual level (a PC, Notepad, and a couple of O'Reilly books sufficed), the costs to stand up a professional, scalable operation with the necessary tools and talent took meaningful CAP/OPEX investment. (Which is why we also were able to institute the less-laudable norm of blowing massive stacks of cash on meaningless toys and parties -- they were a relatively minor line item next to everything else.) So, yeah, the suits were running stuff from the beginning -- they may have been government, military, academia, or corporate, but someone had to front that cash. While I certainly buy into the belief that platform monopolies and morally-murky business models are of grave concern, I love the fact that a kid can stand up a SaaS business in a weekend on a DO droplet and never have to beg for a seed investment.