In a 2015 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Entropy Economics president Bret Swanson observed that the combined market capitalization of U.S. technology giants Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Intel and Microsoft was larger than the entire stock markets of countries like Germany and Australia. Swanson’s statistic was a reminder that backwards numbers like GDP don’t come to close to revealing the actual size of the U.S. economy. It also said something about where entrepreneurialism in the U.S. is rewarded.
Indeed, despite the fact that the U.S. technology sector is defined by massively capitalized companies, new ones enter the space all the time. It’s hardly insightful to say that Silicon Valley and other U.S. technology locales are littered with well-funded start-ups eager to knock the existing tech giants off of their perches. That so much investment is flowing into the technology space is a signal that more than a few of today’s start-ups will be tomorrow’s economy-altering giants. Technology remains a very competitive industry that is plainly open to newcomers eager to disrupt the existing order.
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