I've recently come across two interesting and related perspectives, which highlight why Online Entrepreneurs - at least, those who are focusing on cloud start-ups - are able to ramp up more efficiently than their ISV predecessors.

The first is from the IT Market Dynamics 'cloudfingr' research. We found that just over half of SaaS suppliers in Canada rely on IaaS to support delivery - meaning that they can ramp up quickly and inexpensively.

The second, which resulted from a discussion I had with the CVCA's Richard Remillard earlier this week, notes that new investments by VCs in cloud companies can be much smaller than before. In our conversation, Remillard used the number "$200,000;" in a subsequent email exchange, online entrepreneur Alex Sirota said that "Cloud can start for 20k now forget 200k."

This is an important confluence of perspective - there is, as Remillard pointed out in our conversation, much less venture capital available within Canada now than there was in the dot.com era - and yet, as Alex, I, and others have observed, the low barriers of entry enabled by cloud open the doors for a much larger pool of entrepreneurs to bring a much larger group of companies and products to market. In this case, we're all hoping that a relatively small amount of money goes a long way - we have a long way to go, to enable online entrepreneurs to develop into substantial companies!