Bill Loumpouridis

Bill Loumpouridis

I’m always invigorated by the energy, enthusiasm and out-of-the-box thinking I find at start-up events. The most recent Founder Showcase event I attended in the Bay Area did not disappoint. A bonus for me was that I got to meet one of my heroes – Mark Suster, whose blog I consider one of the finest in the start-up world.

In my own recent blog entry, Spontaneous Ecosystems, I wrote about the fact that “what you get in Web 2.0 is that the barrier of entry goes to zero”. At the Founder Showcase Naval Ravikant’s killer keynote elaborated on this point by describing the current era as the “age of fee leverage”; meaning it has become so inexpensive to start a company that “everyone has done it.”  Leverage in this case is defined as access to cheap “capital, labor, and machines.” The access to “machines” being provided by cloud providers such as Amazon have become ubiquitous. Nearly every startup that I spoke to at the Showcase is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their technology platform. In addition to AWS, other IP Platforms mentioned by Naval include Apple’s iOS and Facebook Connect, both of which have spawned ecosystems of a scale unimaginable a few short years ago.

It is really stunning how much Cloud Computing has completely democratized the technology startup landscape. It’s almost like in LA, where 80% of the population is working on their screenplay. Even here in the Midwest, newsletters like Tech Cocktail and Flyover Geeks tirelessly promote countless local start-ups on a weekly basis. I truly believe that we are at an unprecedented age for developing the next big idea. The only barriers to entry left are self-made: fear, uncertainty and doubt.  Beyond that, The Cloud presents no limits.