The milestones have definitely moved, but so have the underlying costs. It costs far less to build a solution, deploy it and acquire users. Modern languages, fr

The milestones have definitely moved, but so have the underlying costs. It costs far less to build a solution, deploy it and acquire users. Modern languages, frameworks and API services save man-years of time, cloud hosting means you can get on demand for pennies what would have cost thousands in upfront server costs. The milestones for user numbers have also inflated, because simply the number of people on the internet has exploded as has the amount of time they spend online across multiple devices. It's also become much cheaper to acquire users due to the collapse of ad prices and virality of modern distribution platforms. Seed rounds are also much bigger, a seed round of $1m would have been exceptional in 2004. Now people wouldn't batter an eyelid. You've also seen VCs who were previously Series A investors now doing seed investment as well.