This is really missing the point. Ignoring the obvious missing things (salaries, computers, cost to carry inventory, servers), the bigger issue is that the inte

This is really missing the point. Ignoring the obvious missing things (salaries, computers, cost to carry inventory, servers), the bigger issue is that the internet has become massively more competitive over the last couple years and the costs to acquire and keep customers are much higher than they used to be. The importance of sophisticated sales and marketing teams has increased a lot, and the costs along with them. It's easier than ever to build a small-to-medium sized SaaS company (see: the excellent Indie Hackers community), but harder than ever to build a scalable startup. Also, the post alludes to selling physical things, and the costs associated with that are still very high, and have arguably increased, per the ever-increasing size of Kickstarter campaigns and still high failure rates.