|
It was silly. Inexperienced people putting up really simplistic sites with no business model, and people throwing money at it. But the biggest difference is that nobody really knew what we were doing. The thing YC and others have brought to the industry is a consistent path for startups to follow. If you want to start something, and want to go down that high-risk path, there are playbooks to follow and incubators to apply to, with easy access to information on how it will look. None of that existed back then. Nobody was walking around talking about the pros and cons of VC vs. bootstrapping, or how to get funding, or how to avoid getting scammed. The basic practices of developing a product, finding product/market fit, iterating based on feedback... those weren't common knowledge. Now lets also get rid of stack overflow, blogs, and pretty much most sources of information online -- all of that came later. You bought books and read them. You asked your friends for info, and hopefully they knew something. Usenet was a thing, and that is where you might find better info. Lets get rid of the Agile manifesto, too -- people were either doing waterfall or winging it with their own processes. And the jobs were mostly consulting gigs, requiring lots of meeting and proposals, not self-service signups to a SaaS. Let us not forget that we did not have git, either. We used old-school source control (if any), self-hosted, check-in-check-out style workflows. In short, we were (mostly) all inexperienced beginners, without access to much information, flailing about trying to do something new, using really old practices. It didn't really work. But it was kinda fun. |