[maxlamb]

I think this essay was valid for the year it was written (2007) where much fewer people were doing startups, lots of good ideas had not been executed yet, mobile was about to take off. Just like the belief in 2007 that "real estate prices can never go down" lead to the real estate bubble/crash that eventually invalidated that statement, if everyone starts beleiving if they start a company and never give up they will become rich even if their idea is bad, will end up invalidating that very belief.

[CPLX]

Yeah exactly.

Things were really really different then. Youtube was two years old, Facebook had only been open to non students for less than a year. Things like making databases of electronic parts or other less sexy B2B style ideas were often still wide open green fields with almost no competition. Plus just making websites work was tough, the cloud existed but just getting servers to work and stay up was a non trivial part of launching something.

You can't just do the X + Software formula anymore and expect to get anywhere.

[slededit]

2007 was In the shadow of the post 2000 crash. People were still debating with me if going in to Computer Science even made sense (aren’t they sending all those jobs to India?). The financial crisis would happen just a few months later and take almost 10 years to recover.

There’s a bias when looking at the past. We tend to assume the future was both inevitable and easily predictable. Not like these uncertain times today.

Now pre-2000s was a little different. VCs were taking to me on the phone about my “robotics” company. I was 10.