>Heh, if it's that easy then, ummm, go build it?
I did not mean to say that I could build a product like these to demean or belittle them in any way. The vision, ideas and UX execution behind them were clearly thought up by inspired and talented people. What I mean to say is that from a purely technical standpoint, they would be trivially easy to build, so I don't see why you would need to raise millions to pay for "software engineers" to build and maintain your initial product. They are just simple CRUD apps, a class of system of which there are a deluge of accessible and easy to pick up resources and frameworks available to learn how to work with, and a huge pool of cheap developers available. The technical problems that they solve are not novel in any way. While some of the Silicon Valley brogrammer types like to paint themselves as these renegade code wizards hacking on these super hard to solve problems(probably because it helps them get a paycheck), the truth is the problems imposed by CRUD apps are some of the most already solved around. I don't mean to say that there aren't plenty of code wizards hacking on hard to solve problems, but I bet they sure aren't CRUD related. Hell, I don't think its unreasonable at all that 1 or 2 completely non-technical cofounders could team up and learn Ruby on Rails or Django in a couple of months and put a viable product together. If you use an IaaS/PaaS system, Google or Amazon or whoever handles scalability problems for you - its literally as easy as moving a slider and paying more money. Why pay $230k a year for a "scalability/reliability engineer", when I could pay exponentially less to Google or AWS and not have to worry about anything? Even if those didn't exist, have you ever heard of a user facing web company failing because their tech stack wasn't efficient, because it was built by someone just average at coding who chose an easy to work with system with a fast dev cycle and not a "Full stack Javascript distributed scalability Guru"? No, because by the point where the efficiency of their tech stack became a problem, they would have enough capital to hire 10 engineers to rewrite the whole system in Scala or whatever flavor of the month stack tech bloggers happened to be writing about if they so chose.
If your company required some kind of technology that only someone with specialized skills could work with, I would understand. Robotics software? Sure. Biotech? Sure. Life-critical systems? Sure. But I won't be told that photo sharing and social media apps in this day and age require that much capital to build.
And networking? It seems to be that tech, is one of the fields in which this matters less than others to build a successful company, which is why it attracts so many of the engineer types who hate dealing with bullshit. They don't want to deal with bureaucracies and market analysis, they just want to build awesome stuff. I'm certainly not saying it doesn't matter at all, but I find it hard to believe that people would sell away stakes in their companies just for "networking opportunities".
Google was unlike these companies, in that the product was unique in both idea and technical implementation. The idea was original - organizing search results by relevancy, and the algorithm behind the PageRank implementation required a bit of high level math. The actual engine was implemented in C++, not exactly the easiest language to work with. But like I said, Google was pretty much bootstrapped until they really did need the money. They didn't immediately raise millions prelaunch and headhunt the best engineers in the valley. The founders were bright CS people who built their thing, ran out of a garage, and solved problems on their own for as long as they could. When they received their first investment they hadn't even incorporated yet - they had to go file the papers and wait a week before depositing the money in an account. It would seem that the average founder has gone from being the type who is a tinkerer primarily interested in tech and doing stuff that hasn't been done before(think Sergey and Larry, Bill Gates, Wozniak, Paul Graham, Zuckerberg)- but with a side interest in business, now to the type who is primarily interested in business and sees tech only as a means to an end, and raising as much capital as possible and throwing it at developers and marketing people as a means to achieve that end.
I don't mean this to sound condescending or whatever, I'm just trying to come up with reasons here.