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I haven't observed web startups running into a "cash crunch." That said, it does seem to me that the market is exuberant right now. There are business cycles t
by joshuamerrill 15y ago
I haven't observed web startups running into a "cash crunch."
That said, it does seem to me that the market is exuberant right now. There are business cycles that imply things will go the other way at some point.
I also want to point out that it's utterly specious to compare the 826 consumer web startups funded in the last two years against the 416 funded in 1998-2000. How much bigger is the total addressable market? ~200 million people in the late '90s vs. 2.1 billion today? And that doesn't include mobile.
Similarly with the comparison of VC fundraising. The capital requirements of an Internet business are completely different today than they were in the '90s. (Does anyone from Web 1.0 remember budgeting $150,000 for servers?)
- alperakgun 15y agoThis last wave of startups has brought an incredible number of successful ones, and innumerable number ones waiting for monetization. As you said, the audience grew to billions of people. I remember in 2000, we were still trying to convince people that Internet is here to stay,to shop and to do business.
- joshuamerrill 15y agoSimilarly in mobile, where worldwide subscribers have grown from ~400 million in 1999 to over 5 billion today. The smartphone segment of that is still relatively small, but it's growing 100% year over year. Meanwhile, today's largest Internet companies have five times as many users as the entire Internet subscriber base in 1999. My point is, startups that can profitably solve a problem have HUGE markets to sell to!