I think the improvement has more to do with the cost of starting up these days.
You can get a lot further down the road now vs 1996/99, before VC is necessary. By the time you take VC, properly, you can command a lot more and give up a lot less.
If the costs today still demanded giving up your soul to get started, then despite the improved access to information, I'd say that founders would still be giving up vast chunks of equity early to pursue their startup.
There's a story, that in the process of creating Excite, the founders needed to buy a hard drive that cost $10,000 to store 10gb just to test their indexing at scale. Well, Vinod Khosla gave his blessing and they went ahead. Obviously today you can test a massive data set for 1% of that cost.
Vinod: "Can the technology scale? can you search a large database?"
...
Team: "We don't know, we can't afford a hard drive big enough to test."
"Then, an amazing thing happened. Ten minutes into this meeting, his first introduction to the company and us, he [Vinod] pulls out his his cell phone, dials his assistant and buys us a $10,000, 10Gb hard drive."
You can get a lot further down the road now vs 1996/99, before VC is necessary. By the time you take VC, properly, you can command a lot more and give up a lot less.
If the costs today still demanded giving up your soul to get started, then despite the improved access to information, I'd say that founders would still be giving up vast chunks of equity early to pursue their startup.
There's a story, that in the process of creating Excite, the founders needed to buy a hard drive that cost $10,000 to store 10gb just to test their indexing at scale. Well, Vinod Khosla gave his blessing and they went ahead. Obviously today you can test a massive data set for 1% of that cost.
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/persistence_pay.htm...
Vinod: "Can the technology scale? can you search a large database?"
...
Team: "We don't know, we can't afford a hard drive big enough to test."
"Then, an amazing thing happened. Ten minutes into this meeting, his first introduction to the company and us, he [Vinod] pulls out his his cell phone, dials his assistant and buys us a $10,000, 10Gb hard drive."