Exactly! Apple wouldn't have existed without access to the MOS 6502 and other electronics, which allowed Woz to carry out his dream of building a personal computer. Microsoft might not have existed without the Altair 8800. Many 1990s and 2000s web startups got off the ground with affordable, available hardware, whether it's hand-me-down RISC workstations or commodity x86 PCs.
Granted, to be fair, many of today's startups and small businesses are made possible by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud services. It is sometimes cheaper to rent a server than to own one, and there are fewer system administration chores. However, there's something to be said about owning your own infrastructure rather than renting it out, and I think a major risk of compute power being concentrated by just a few major players is the terms of computation being increasingly dictated by those players.
Granted, to be fair, many of today's startups and small businesses are made possible by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud services. It is sometimes cheaper to rent a server than to own one, and there are fewer system administration chores. However, there's something to be said about owning your own infrastructure rather than renting it out, and I think a major risk of compute power being concentrated by just a few major players is the terms of computation being increasingly dictated by those players.