The greatest moment to start a company? Right Now!

Why? Four reasons... and you can guess at least two of them.

“If only I had started a company during the desktop PC revolution in the 80s and 90s!” 

“If only I had started a company at the start of the internet!” 

“If only I had started an app or cloud company during the ZIRP run up from 2009 to 2021!”

“If only I had started a company during web 2.0 in 2005!” 

I lived through all four of those tech supercycles.

I learned in the first one (the PC revolution), got famous in the second (dot com), and made my fortune during the last two (web 2.0 and ZIRP).

The last four tech-driven “supercycles” are worth studying:

1. The 1980s: The PC revolution created Microsoft ($2.7T market cap), Apple ($3T), and Dell ($48.8B).

2. The 1990s: The dot-com bubble created Google ($1.7T) and Yahoo.

3. The 2000s: The web 2.0 created YouTube, Facebook ($855B), Dropbox, Thumbtack, and Tesla.

4. The 2010s: The ZIRP era, which created Uber ($126B), Airbnb, DoorDash, and Coinbase.

We’re heading into what I will name “The AI Roaring 20s.”

Why The AI Roaring 20s will be the greatest time to start your company

The next supercycle is starting right now, in 2023 and 2024.

There are four reasons this will be the greatest super cycle of our lifetime:

1. AI.

2. An unlimited, cheap, and global talent pool — powered by AI tools.

3. Unlimited venture capital for any winning startup (defined as a startup that can get to $500,000 in revenue), with reasonable gross margins and burn.

4. Absurdly low operating costs, including not just talent but marketing, technology, professional services, and tools.

Jason’s Law: Every supercycle drops the cost of starting a company by 50%.

1980s
In the PC era, you needed 20 people and $6M in 2023 dollars to start a company. You needed to build core technology, rack servers, get an office manager and an office, and then spend two years building your product.

1990s
This dropped to 10 people and $3m in the dotcom era. You racked servers, spent a year building product, and had an office.

2000s
In Web 2.0 we started companies with $1.5m and five people. Co-location providers and office sharing started, as did remote work and offshore developers. APIs and open-source software cut costs and developer cycles dramatically.

2010s
In ZIRP, we saw companies start with three builders and $750,000. Github, AWS, WeWork, Fivver, Upwork, and the global workforce meant a startup could launch a product in a 12-week incubator and scale it to millions in revenue in a few years.

2020s
In the roaring 20s, you can easily start your company with three founders and $375,000 — heck, even $25,000. IDEs, cloud, open source AI models, no code, low code, and a decade of remote work and workers means your product can be in customers’ hands in under 30 days.

In Summary…

Now is the greatest time to launch a startup. Uber, Spotify, Google, and Facebook aren’t hiring; most are quietly or publicly “getting fit” (aka, culling the weakest members of the herd).

You can find two founders and teach yourself to code, do growth hacking, or be a UX designer in months, so what are you waiting for?

What’s your excuse?

Who's holding you back now?

You could drive Uber or DoorDash three days a week and work on your startup with two friends on the other four days.

There are unlimited problems waiting to be solved and talent that wants to work.

I’m investing in 100 startups a year, and I’m hoping that I can be your first investor.

If this is interesting to you, please watch this video.

Let’s…. do the work

best, JCal

The other images Dall-E came up with for a the prompt "you are the worlds greatest illustrator working for the world's greatest essay writer. the essay is about creating startups in the 2020s the writer believes now is the best time ever to start a company and build amazing, futuristic things we need a header image of 1920x1080 pixels for this blog post we want it to combine the feeling of the roaring 1920s in America with a technology-driven optimistic future "