I've been doing running internet/technology startups since '95. Here's my $0.02 * Labour costs roughy the same per hour. Although using the likes of elance or

I've been doing running internet/technology startups since '95. Here's my $0.02 * Labour costs roughy the same per hour. Although using the likes of elance or even mechanical turk, it is much easier to find cheaper labour for certain tasks. * Hardware is a lot cheaper/faster. Strangely - due to the bloated & broken nature of things like Boost, compile times have stayed strangely constant! More importantly, the likes of VPS significantly improve the cash flow. A server to host your first website is now $10 a month with no contract. Ten years ago - you'd be locked into long contracts or buying a machine. You want twenty servers to stress test something, or test software on 8 different Linux versions, fire up some EC2 instances. There simple wasn't the equivalent back then. * The development time to build most systems has got a lot less. The availability of libraries, cloud-services, APIs & virtual machines has drastically reduced the time taken to build certain types of systems. E.g. with something like Tropo you can quickly build fairly advanced telephony services. With AWS, you have access to huge computing resources should you need it. Web frameworks have significantly reduced the time to do CRUD-like tasks. * The quality of FOSS is far higher now than it was then. Particularly the libraries and development tools. The quality of community sites (e.g. StackOverflow) also helps a lot in terms of access to development knowledge. * Most markets are more mature now in terms of what is a minimum viable product. E.g. to build a web business now - it prob needs to be more polished then ten years ago. * The Internet market place is a lot bigger. E.g. there are a lot more Internet users, app-buyers. Ten years ago - a business like AirBnB wold probably have not had enough users gain critical mass. * The ease of reaching customers is easier. Things like Apple's App store (or even Facebook) makes it pretty easy to reach buyers, receive customer payments etc. Similarly the likes of twitter and viral/social marketing to all certain types of product to get a lot of cheap exposure. * The ability to develop web based applications as opposed to desktop applications does significantly reduce development costs. Not that developing for IE6 isn't a pain, but it's a damn site easier than having to develop and support lots of different desktop operating systems and legacy versions.