The Falling Cost Of Entrepreneurship

The cost of starting a business has declined in three distinct waves. First was the shift from offline to online commerce, which eliminated geography as a constraint. Second was the emergence of companies like Shopify, which bundled payments, logistics, and capital into a unified commerce platform, giving small merchants the operational infrastructure previously available only to large retailers. The third is artificial intelligence (AI), which is compressing the cost, labor, and expertise necessary to run a company. Described in more depth below, each wave has been democratizing entrepreneurship. Combined, they are rewriting the economics of entrepreneurship.