VC investment didn’t roar back in huge numbers because it didn’t have to. In the Web 2.0 era, you could create a service used by millions in a matter of months, and you could do so for pennies on the dollar—at least, compared to the dot-com era. The hangover from the bubble fallout meant that talented programmers could be hired on the cheap; the infrastructure glut leftover from the global fiber buildout meant that bandwidth, storage and data costs were lower; and the tools developed during the bubble meant that you didn’t have to build a company from scratch anymore—
