In a modern business, without the backing of the financial community, you’re finished. This is because business has changed, particularly high-tech and communications businesses that have come on the market in the past fifteen years.

The whole world, in fact, has changed. Even change has changed. It used to be that change was gradual; it happened over many years. Even over decades, retailing, banking, and service businesses didn’t change very much. This gave the little guys a chance to grow big on their own. Take any business—shipping, for instance. Someone would buy a ship and begin carrying goods between New York and London. He might even skipper the ship himself. Over time, if the business was run well, he’d buy a second, then a third ship. He’d hire captains and stay behind in the office, lining up more importers and exporters to use his service. Slowly, bank financing would become available. The fleet would grow to massive proportions. By the end of a forty-year career, he’d have an empire to pass on to his son. The whole business, though, wouldn’t be that fundamentally different from when he had only one ship. And, in fact, even as he passed the business to his son, other solo captains with one ship would already be well on their way to building their own fleet and competing with the established company.

How different from today! Say a young man has an idea to go into the shipping business. His angle is to get the packages there overnight. After doing some initial start-up work he goes to a Wall Street underwriter and shows them his business plan. The underwriter brings the offering to eager mutual fund investors, who pour many millions of dollars into the new company. Suddenly the young man is able to lease large jets, fleets of trucks, airport and warehouse facilities across the country. He’s able to hire a sales force and do a national advertising campaign. Federal Express is born.

With all this, on the first day and for many days after that, only a few dozen packages are handled. The firm is losing a ton of money. More than the captain made in his whole career. Losses big enough to crush not only his fleet, but a whole navy. Not to worry. Wall Street funds the deficit. Soon, surely enough, people start to use the service, and a new industry is born.

Forget about getting one van and starting to compete with FedEx. They’re all over. There is no way to bootstrap yourself up to that level. Only Airborne Express or UPS, with Wall Street backing of their own, can hope to compete.

It just happens all too fast nowadays for the lone wolf to have a chance. Netscape’s public offering creates a stock with a billion-dollar value overnight. This value is used to hire hundreds of top programmers, acquire complementary firms, hire salespeople and customer service reps across the country. Of course, the company’s losing a fortune. They have no sales, because up till now all they’ve done is give away their product. Yet, as the Internet looms even larger, what start-up has even a chance to compete in the browser market against mighty Netscape? The industry is less than two years old and already market domination has been determined. Only mighty Microsoft, with an even greater capital base, is left to compete.