[ineedasername]

Good point, that's true. The lack of FAANG dominance at the time meant that labor cost would have been cheaper even before inflation. On the other hand, founders & early employees of startups often accept little or very reduced salaries on the prospect of large gains on exit, especially after the bubble burst & Y2K went away, leaving excess talent unused.

It would be interesting to analyze the difference between the lowered infrastructure costs against increased salary costs to see what the net $ effect was in terms of funding a comparable startup. If you were willing to ignore the increased cost of scaling if/when you hit the hockey stick growth and simply opt for a few co-located dedicated servers running a LAMP stack, maybe infrastructure costs would still have been low enough that the difference would be negligible. Although you might still have needed more dedicated expertise in dev ops to manage it, increasing salary... I'm not sure. I was in college 20 years ago and not very caught up in following startup culture until a few years later.