Back in the day there were many opportunities up for grabs; for online businesses the limiting factor was programming skills and if you had that (keep in mind t

Back in the day there were many opportunities up for grabs; for online businesses the limiting factor was programming skills and if you had that (keep in mind that the tooling was much more primitive at the time so a lot of what we take for granted today had to be discovered & implemented from scratch) you were golden, therefore relying on outside investment was much less required. Nowadays, almost every opportunity out there has either been tried and proven not to be viable or monopolized by a big player that can sell at a loss thanks to VC subsidies. Skill alone won't get you anywhere, now you need lots of capital to try and break through and you get that capital from VCs which means you need to play by their rules - in general, "rocking the boat" is not a good strategy. In addition, the amount of capital slushing around and burning holes in VCs' pockets means opened a new "market" where building a business that solves a real problem and makes money off it is no longer the priority, instead you could merely convince VCs to give you money and enjoy the "startup founder" life regardless if the business ends up successful. That's a much easier and less risky strategy (until today), so we ended up with a lot of startups that don't actually create any value and just leech off VCs.