Also as humans we are myopic and can only understand everything as a relation to us. His tweet (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657) about how you don't need to be rich to run a startup invariably shows that as humans we are poor at judging almost anything out of our current circle of understanding.

The major major thing that makes a startup successful in almost all cases is money. With enough wind even chickens can fly.

There are millions of brilliant people all over the world whose ideas we never see because they never had their opportunity or funding to bring their ideas to life.

> With enough wind even chickens can fly.

This metaphor's impact is as strong as Lei Jun's famous saying, who is the CEO and founder of Xiaomi:

With enough wind even PIG can fly.

> With enough wind even chickens can fly.

Off topic: I'm not familiar with this turn of phrase, but as anyone who has ever chased after free range chickens as a child knows - chickens fly fine with no wind at all. The can only fly a short distance though.

> Why is it that this argument only seems to apply to software?

Maybe because software has a unique property: a practically zero marginal ("reproduction") cost. Hence software, and services that depend only on software are suitable for the rocket-fuel injection strategy VCs so heavily rely on.

Make no mistake - good software is damn expensive to create, but once it's ready for delivery, creating and selling additional copies (or serving more clients) costs practically nothing.

the distribution costs nothing but six months old software is still six months old software. Pushing half finished products on the entire world is another 'feature' hailed by people like PG. I thought we had all learned how great "move fast and break things" and "when it works you're shipping too late" is for us at this point.

There was a good article on HN recently about 500 year old Japanese family owned businesses. Most hypergrowth software probably doesn't live five. Isn't it interesting that most of the software that actually has lived decades looks more like it's made by people like that rather than VC fuelled companies?

200 years ago, railway was the big thing. Everyone was interested in building railways, steam engines, etc. Companies sprung up, many people got rich. Nowadays, the railways are already built and transport many goods. Building new railways is extremely expensive now because we have lost the know how, workforce, have higher labour standards, bureaucracy etc. Nowadays we are mainly considering how to operate railway tracks instead of building new ones.

Nowadays, software is the new economic frontier and enjoys explosive growth. The land that software embarks into is still virgin, and it's comparatively easy to build a new software company. It's a growth market.

In such an environment, bootstrapped companies are generally at a disadvantage to VC started companies, as bootstrapped ones can focus on capturing the market before becoming profitable, while bootstrapped ones have to keep both in mind. So people turn to VCs.

This situation of explosive growth is kinda unique to software, and VCs aren't the only solution to the problem, but the dot com bubble has shown what happens when companies go public more early on in the process.