" People did start their own businesses of course, but educated people rarely did, because in those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call a startup: a business that starts small and grows big. That was much harder to do in the mid 20th century. Starting one's own business meant starting a business that would start small and stay small."
And what's wrong with that?
Besides it being false of course.
If anything it's more sustainable and more productive (as these business MAKE something, don't just eat VC dollars or at best sell ads) than today's "startups" model, which is based mostly on a speculative bubble + ad money.
All the thousands of major companies, from IBM to Bell and from HP to Apple, Boeing, McDonalds and Kodak, and countless others in all lines of business started as small and grew from there.
It's a perversion (and counters the rest of PGs rhetoric) to narrow startups to "companies funded with VC money for a few years to get enough users/eyeballs in the hope that they can be sold for a few billions" which is more or less the modern kind.
I think pg would likely answer "Nothing". Whenever he brings up that sort of entrepreneurship, it's generally to showcase the rarity and timescale with which these small businesses (IBM, Boeing, GE) got huge in a time before the internet.
I'd agree that the Internet hasn't made big businesses get any more substantive, but it has allowed them to get bigger faster.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-small-business/post/...
I guess a difference would be that now you don't need employees.