I think Paul is over-generalizing. Young, fast-developing industries tend to produce rich ecosystems of startups due to low cost of entry. But over time, as industries mature, companies are naturally starting to consolidate into larger and larger entities in order to survive. Paul thinks that just because we're seeing this early growth in web software, it applies to all economic activities of mankind.

Using Pauls's main arguments (historical perspective) it's not hard to "prove" the opposite: world is constantly moving towards consolidation.

Look: Desktop software development world looked very much like web scene today: one person could invent (and implement) an electronic table or an editor or a basic interpreter or an interesting game and do very well financially (has been done thousands of times). Yet in the early-mid 90s most software got prohibitively expensive to build for a small firm.

Also you can go back to early automotive boom in the US: there were myriads of automotive startups in mid-west (and in Europe too) and look what happened to all of them later. Same can be said regarding telecom, oil and railroad industries.

Developing industry = more startups Mature industry = very few startups

Has always been like that.

What a poorly-chosen title. It took me a while to realize that "gears" is the verb; it's not about Google Gears. Non-title capitalization could have avoided the ambiguity.

Future economies will be made out of more, smaller pixels.

Also, perhaps you could get a better domain name for your project with the tool? ;p

There are some errors in the sql.

The monthlyRevenue field datatype should be tinyint(1) with a default of NULL.

Step 1: Be Guy Kawasaki

Step 2: Spend about $10,000 more than you need to because you're already independently wealthy through non-startup means (read: AAPL)

Step 3: Get much more attention for your startup than most people would because you're Guy Kawasaki

Step 4: Sell as soon as it's feasible

Step 5: Profit

Can't we leave this to Twitter? I don't visit a news site to hear what music you're listening to right now.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=367418

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212682

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139901

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132026

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936

So, disclaimer: I'm a Mercurial fan.

There are two big things git has traditionally done better than Mercurial: lightweight branching, and rebasing. Both were possible in Mercurial using mq (plus qguards, in the case of lightweight branching), but the experience was rather clumsy. I didn't mind putting up with it, since, at the time the two systems came out, Mercurial was markedly easier to use than git. But, over the last year, git closed a lot of the usability gap, while Mercurial has held almost completely still, and that's resulted in a lot of arguments that Mercurial's time had passed, and git was the way to go.

The good news is that this release fully eliminates git's first advantage, and either eliminates, eliminates and beats, or fails to address the second, depending on where you're coming from. The easy news to process: the rebase extension enables full git-style rebasing, end of story. You can do an automatic pull and rebase via `hg pull --rebase`, if that's what you want, or you can do more customized rebasing via `hg rebase`. So that's done, and, based on my use in production environments, works very well.

Now, Mercurial 1.1 introduces real lightweight branching--no mq hackery--via an extension called `bookmarks`, which ships with Mercurial. These provide identical capabilities and benefits as git's local branches. The complicated discussion we can have revolves around bookmark semantics. bookmarks, like git branches, are basically "floating tags"--tags that mark a head in the repo's DAG, and that move with that head as you issue additional commits. The difference comes from the fact that bookmarks very directly expose what's going on, whereas git's branch command hides what's going on behind what I personally feel is a more intuitive UI. So, the argument is: is exposing what's actually going on better, because it gives you more power; equivalent, since the functionality provided is identical; or worse, because too much implementation is exposed in interface. I personally need more time to sort out preconceived bias of what micorbranching should look like, from the bookmark extension in particular.

One thing to realize: If you Inc/LLC in 2008, you'll have to pay any taxes/fees due for 2008. Forming a DE LLC right now would cost you more money than waiting until Jan 1 and paying the $150 because you'd have to pay the $250 franchise fee for 2008. LLC on Jan 1 and you don't have to pay it for 2008. You're up $100 even with the $150 fee.