None of her arguments are convincing. In particular, it doesn't matter how many other people are starting startups. It's not as if there's some limit to the total number of startups that can succeed.
Even if her arguments do hold up and now is somehow relatively worse than some time in the past (or future?) for starting startups it's still hard to argue that startups are worse than the alternative. Hopefully no one's arguing that this is an especially good time to take a crap job at a large company.
Did you hear that everyone? It's time to quit and go home. So please. Stop working on your companies. Seriously. You're not good enough. You'll never make it.
Caterina's caveat... "I was talking here about consumer-facing Web 2.0 companies based in San Francisco and the Valley"
I think there are a lot of bad ideas floating around (http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html - Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas) but still, a bad time to start a company? A vibrant competetive market produces some of the best products, if nobody started a company when there was a lot of competition we'd be without Google (and many others). Thoughts?
being a bad or hard time it doesn't mean you can't do it.
creating a company doesn't mean you will produce a new technology or you have thought the next big thing...
after all, we all know that 1 out of 10 start-ups succeed...
from her speech 1 month later, you can see that they made flickr it for themselves..it was fun etc...
i guess is not about making a company as much as about doing it for you and hopefully, your idea, passion and implementation will produce a success...making a company is one of the steps...
from ''Founders At work'', being over-funded may kill your company... so everybody else getting funded means nothing...