Those 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

Those 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.