I was working in New York City at the time as editor of Portfolio.com, which became part of American City Business Journals acquired in mid-2009. As part of ACBJ, the parent company of Silicon Valley Business Journal, Portfolio.com turned its focus to startups and entrepreneurship.
They paid no attention to what was happening on the corporate front or in the battered banking world. They also weren't taking part in the Occupy Wall Street movement, or fighting against the very idea of capitalism. And they weren't listening to naysayers who trotted out the standard word of caution that most new businesses would fail in their first few years.
This week's cover story from Cromwell Schubarth — which tracks how more than 50 startups launched in the Bay Area during the depths of the Great Recession have become success stories — could be looked at as a startup hall of fame. Airbnb reinvented lodging. Uber and Lyft reinvented ground transportation. Slack and WhatsApp reinvented instant messaging. Block, which started its life as Square, reinvented how small businesses took payments.
Whatever circumstances got them into entrepreneurship, these founders also benefited from something else: they rode the Web 2.0 wave. That period, which started about two years before the Great Recession began, was marked by the rise of social networking, user-generated content and software-as-a-service tools that made launching a company easier and much less expensive.
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