Dotcoms making it happen- fast and big!

The time-span for making it has certainly become a lot shorter during the last couple of decades. Gone are the days where it took a life-time of hard work to become a billionaire, and enter the club of the super-rich. Today, all it seems to take is a laptop, a vision, some serious coding skills, perserverance and luck. During the first Internet boom companies were valued in ridiculous ways, but things have changed. Today a lot of the Internet giants have actually found ways to make money online (who would have guessed) and in some cases they are even raking it in faster than they can count it. But more importantly- the speed with which some of these companies have conquered the world is truly mindblowing.

Apple is at the top of the food chain at the moment, with a market cap of some $ 546 billion and an incredible $ 25 billion in profit for 2011. However, Apple was founded as early as 1976, which essentially means it is an “old”" company by the standards of the industry. Well, what about Google? With a market cap of some $ 204 billion and a 2011 profit of $ 9.4 billion they are certainly a force to be reckoned with. But Google was founded in 1998, which doesn´t necessarily make it “old”, but it´s certainly not ciónsidered a young company. Enter Facebook, the social network giant with a somewhat unidentifiable market cap anywhere in the range of $ 70-100 billion and a net profit for 2011 just shy of $ 1 billion. Facebook has been around since 2004, and many still consider it quite a new kid on the block. And yet, they are not considered a young company. Same goes for LinkedIn, founded in 2002, with a market cap of roughly $ 10 billion and a $ 10 million 2011 profit.

In order to be considered a rather young company you need to have a profile corresponding to Twitter, Zynga or Groupon. Twitter was founded in July of 2006, Zynga was founded in April of 2007 and Groupon was founded in November of 2008. They all have market caps in the range $ 9-10 billion and both Zynga and Groupon made around $ 400 million in profits for 2011. They are the poster boys of the new economy- and a fast-paced and energetic environment with plenty of opportunity. If you make it in this industry- it happens fast and it happens big. There´s of course a flip side to the coin. MySpace and Yahoo were considered champions a while ago. Not so anymore. Instead unknown companies like Pinterest have taken the leap and are toeing the line to dotcom stardom. Change happens quickly. What´s hot today may not be hot tomorrow. All it takes is one small mistake, a new trend or technology and the dotcom battlefield could end up looking very different indeed.

Everybody is looking for the new hot fearless “kid on the block”, and a chance to get in early, before the writing is on the wall. And they should be, because the world around us is changing a lot faster than we might be aware of.

Incredible fortunes are built in shorter time-spans than any other era in world history. These are truly interesting times we are living in…