In 2000, just before the first dot-com bubble burst, it cost a whopping $5 million to launch a tech startup.
If your payloads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they actually cost more than the launch. It puts a lot of pressure on the launch vehicle not to change, to be very stable. Reliability becomes much more important than the cost. It's hard to get off of that equilibrium.
It cost about 75 cents to kill a man in Ceasar's time. The price rose to about $3,000 per man during the Napoleonic wars; to $5,000 in the American Civil War; and then to $21,000 per man in World War I. Estimates for the future wars indicate that it may cost the warring countries not less than $50,000 for each man killed.
I think whether it's a good idea or not to take the startup plunge comes down to the responsibilities of the individual. If you have a family to care for or a huge mortgage payment, then quitting your steady day job to launch a startup probably isn't the best decision to make.
The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
One of the cool things we're seeing at TaskRabbit is local tech and gaming startups hiring TaskRabbits to test their products and deliver immediate user feedback. As the founder of a tech startup, I can tell you that this type of focus group testing is paramount - and usually really pricey and difficult to coordinate.
Slack spread through businesses like wildfire, initially in the tech and media sectors, but now much more widely. At its public launch in February 2014, it had 17,000 users. As of April 1st, 2016, that number had rocketed to 2.7 million daily active users.
I know it's different today than when I was growing up, and that's fine. But I have never been somebody, even when I was earning $19,000 a year, I never ran around whining and moaning about what things cost. What they cost was what they cost. And if I couldn't afford it, then I had to find a way to afford it or forget about it for now. It's just the way it was.
Historically, the U.S.'s big launchers fly seldom enough that their costs are dominated by annual upkeep of facilities and staff, not by the actual cost of each launch. The expensive part is maintaining the launch capability, not actually conducting launches.
In 2016, you no longer have to be in Silicon Valley to launch a successful startup. Colorado is home to many.
Restaurant industry sales in 2011 are estimated to have reached a record high of $604 billion, up 3.6 percent from 2010. Restaurant employment grew 1.9 percent in 2011, with some 230,000 jobs added, the strongest gain in five years.
By the end of 2001, between 100,000 to 150,000 Algerians had died in the civil war, as well as 120 foreigners. The cost to the economy ran into billions of dollars. And all this in spite of a tough, 120,000-strong army backed by 80,000 police.
We are calling ourselves a startup nation, but the number of people who set out on their own is very low; even 10,000 a year would be low in a country like India. We can say we are a startup nation but the world won't say it.
Couture was only for rich people. Givenchy was for rich people. A bag cost 5,000 euro; a coat cost 10,000 euro. In the beginning, I couldn't react. I was just working like a machine, because I wanted to make the house happy.
Please don’t get hung up on this question of whether you need to have experience in an industry before you launch your startup.
St. Louis is a customer- and partner-rich environment for any financial tech startup.