> I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it. That's not the whole s

> I was not a better developer all of a sudden, it was just that startups had piles of money and investors demanding that they spend it. That's not the whole story, though. The Internet inherently changed the value prop for software work, where a small number of engineers could support a huge number of users. That leverage makes software work inherently waaaay more profitable than it was pre-Internet, which is why companies could afford to throw gobs of money at top engineering talent.