Tom Blomfield was named one of the Top 5 Entrepreneurs Under 30 in Europe; in addition to developing for the Ruby programming language and co-founding GoCardless, he recently wrote a column for TechCrunch about “x-as-a-service” startups. He notes that tech startups are taking advantage of “more specialized and niche services” to get themselves off the ground faster and easier than ever before; he then compares the trend to the brick-and-mortar world, where it is significantly harder to access outsourced services without size to back you up. Here is his take on these differences: