Is this the most exciting time for technology & startups in at least ten years, or what?

Just chatting with good friend and AdSemble CEO Matthew Olivieri, a smart scrappy entrepreneur who’s boostrapped his startup in the Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) signage advertising space.  They’ve got a great business model and have carefully taken the time to nail down the product/market fit before they look to ramp.

We were talking about some of the interesting developments in the startup world.  I couldn’t help but think, yet again, how lucky we are as entrepreneurs to be doing what we’re doing now.  Right now.  I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time in the technology industry for at least ten years.  Further, when you factor in the dramatic lowering of the barriers to starting up a company in many very large markets, indeed often creating new very large markets,  it is possibly the best time ever for an entrepreneurs and their emerging young startups.



I am not an expert in such things so I don’t know that this necessarily translate into more startups succeeding, as a percentage success/fail rate, than at other times.  But I do think it’s a time of tremendous opportunity.

The most powerful driver of this is the intersection of two major platform trends:

• the iPhone/Appstore model, which unleashed huge pent up demand by finally breaking the carrier bottle neck over getting apps out into the wild
• the social networking platforms (primarily Facebook but more broadly the whole raft of business built on the top of social graphs and the monetization thereof) which enable distribution at a scale and pace never seen before

I think the convergence of two such dramatic trends is unparalleled and we’ll continue to see rapid innovation spinning off countless new services and market niches.