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But the same can be said for _any_ component in your business that was made outside your office walls. Your operating system. Your compiler. Your office chair.
by erikstarck 16y ago
But the same can be said for _any_ component in your business that was made outside your office walls. Your operating system. Your compiler. Your office chair.
This is in fact how an open and free economy works. You always build on the work of others.
- cperciva 16y agoYes, if you ignore the "(until recently)" part. I'm not trying to be exceptionally profound here; just to point out that the giants on whose shoulders we stand are growing taller by the day.
- danilocampos 16y agoThose components offer only the most marginal of value to the specific work at hand, though. They have application to 99% of startups. Conversely, we see here two very specific components that make success orders of magnitude more easy. This isn't trivial and it's an important part of the overall realities of launching a startup in 2010. Tasks that would have required another person five years ago can be satisfied by services or frameworks today. Instead of spending money on a server lease, maybe requiring investment when you can convince someone, you start small on Heroku/EC2/App Engine free, tonight. Instead of finding someone who's awesome at databases, you get free ORM with your MVC framework of choice. These things aren't trivial. And the current situation is new and dramatic in just how complete the tools are. They let ever-smaller teams do ever-larger things with smaller and smaller investment. Seeing these as zero-equity co-founders can be cast in a gimmicky light but it's also a pretty economical means of description.