Albert Wenger

And basically what she did is she went through history and she looked at multiple cycles of technology and she found that you get these sort of big financial bubbles that then wind up in a lot of deployed physical capital

infrastructure on which then new things get deployed, basically.

So the dot-com bubble put a huge amount of fiber into the ground.

It led to a huge amount of investment in building out data centers and foundational software, investing in databases and load balancing and all that stuff.

And that made it possible then for a company like Delicious to build an application without spending a lot of money.

So when I did my first startup, so while I was getting my PhD at MIT, I also did a startup.

By the way, it's a bad idea to do both your PhD and a startup.

But I did a startup at the end of 96, beginning of 97.

And at that time, you were basically out $100,000 just to get onto the internet.

I mean, between actually getting dedicated bandwidth, getting a dedicated server, getting a bunch of software licenses that you needed for which they weren't open source.

Apache had just gotten going.

You can't age yourself here.

Yeah, no, definitely.

I have no problem with that.

But contrast that with today.

Today, you can get $100,000 in credits to be on the internet.

You can get $100,000 from AWS or from Google Cloud and probably also from Microsoft Cloud.

So we've swung from being negative $100,000 to being

positive 100,000.

That's an extraordinary enabler of innovation, and that's exactly what we've seen.