virtually no possibility of starting a startup ... without connections in your customers or investors.

I feel this frustration is strongest with enterprise software which is usually the most capital intensive to build and requires a lot of trust to sell.

The number of people who get to make decisions about, for example, data warehousing services is already pretty small and the subset of those willing to be somebody's first customer is even smaller.

However, there are plenty of other startup opportunities outside of that space. Consumers, media people and developers are generally easier to chat with than CIOs and still need software to do what they want to do.