

History and evolution of venture capital - austengary
http://pandodaily.com/2013/08/28/this-chart-shows-the-future-of-venture-capital/

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costapopescu
Fun fact: American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) was one of the
first venture capital firms founded in 1946 by Georges Doriot, the "father of
venture capitalism" (former dean of Harvard Business School), Karl Compton
(former president of MIT) and Ralph Flanders. ARDC is credited with the first
major venture capital success story when its 1957 investment of $70,000 in
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) got valued at over $355 million after the
company's IPO in 1968 (representing a return of over 1200 times on its
investment and an annualized rate of return of 101%).

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samspenc
Why did it require "$2 million in the late ’90s" to start a company?

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npalli
1\. You couldn't just lease hardware by the hour like AWS. So you had to put a
lot of money buying hardware from companies like Sun. Also for the same dollar
amount you would get a far smaller box in '90s compared to today.

2\. No good quality free software, you had to buy everything from
Oracle/Microsoft/Netscape to get a decent website up and going. Licenses cost
a lot.

3\. No lean startup model everything was a big bang approach which meant a lot
of cash needed to get version 1. out.

4\. No stackoverflow/google etc. so it just seemed to take longer for
engineers to build something. Debugging took longer , the programming
languages were less mature etc.

Put all together it is about a 100x reduction in getting something in front of
users today.

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tristanz
Having started companies in both 2000 and 2012, I just don't think this is
true. It was easy to put something in front of users in 2000 for less than
$1000. We started with a $20/month shared host, PHP and MySql, and easily
scaled to hundreds of thousands of users just by renting some dedicated
machines. Google, Yahoo, ViaWeb, Facebook, and Ebay all started the same way.
Yes, there were crazy $2M funded startups that bought Sun hardware and Oracle
software, but this was absolutely not required.

Many parts of startups today are harder. Users' expectations for design and
functionality is much higher. The internet was also much smaller in 2000,
which made startups like Google possible.

The explosion in seed deals seems much more driven by the funding landscape,
the rise of mobile and the social web, and cultural recognition of startups
like Facebook.

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paultyng
MySQL and PHP both released in 1995 or so, there was a lot of movement in the
"late 90's" so it really depends on where in there they are actually talking
about.

