In 2006 the cloud quietly arrived, and building a company stopped requiring a fortune.
In March 2006 Amazon launched S3, followed by EC2: rentable, pay-as-you-go computing that let anyone with a credit card run enterprise-grade infrastructure without owning a single server. That January, New Horizons began a nine-year journey toward the first close view of Pluto.
In 2006 I founded Internet Heroes. The same year, mostly unnoticed by the wider world, Amazon started renting out computing by the hour. S3 in March, EC2 not long after. It sounds like plumbing. It was a revolution.
Before that, starting an internet company meant buying servers, racking them, guarding them, and praying your traffic estimate was right. After 2006 you rented exactly what you needed and handed it back when you were done. A founder in Bangalore or Dubai could suddenly reach for the same machinery as a team in California, billed to a card.
I had watched the first web arrive when infrastructure was the hard part, the thing that separated the people who could build from the people who could only dream. The cloud erased that line. What was left was the only thing that ever really mattered: did you have something worth building, and would you actually ship it.
Every company I have started since assumes this. The barrier was never the machines. The machines got cheap. The barrier is nerve.