I see it as the cost of forming a startup is much lower now so they can stay private longer.
I don't think that is true. Sales and marketing is still very expensive. SaaS needs a lot more cash investment than traditional software, since you are only making the money back gradually. Many of these unicorn software companies are raising a half dozen rounds.
Also, the easier it becomes to write software the for the internet, the more a startup has to do. Yahoo! could get to a breakout stage just by having an HTML page full of links. That's not going to cut it these days. So I'm not sure overall if starting a company is much cheaper, even at the early stage.
I don't think that is true. Sales and marketing is still very expensive. SaaS needs a lot more cash investment than traditional software, since you are only making the money back gradually. Many of these unicorn software companies are raising a half dozen rounds.
Also, the easier it becomes to write software the for the internet, the more a startup has to do. Yahoo! could get to a breakout stage just by having an HTML page full of links. That's not going to cut it these days. So I'm not sure overall if starting a company is much cheaper, even at the early stage.