We all know that Facebook has the chance to become the biggest IPO since Google when it goes public next year. Many of my friends are already piling up cash to buy the Company’s stock on opening day so they don’t end up in the same situation as 10 years ago when they overlooked the tech bubble and missed out on some great opportunities.

But why wait another year to make money when you can make money now? Think about what all of the latest hot startups need:  Storage and Bandwidth.All of those pictures that are being uploaded on Facebook is not a cheap endeavor, nor is it storage friendly.

All of those pictures that are uploaded on Facebook do not make for a cheap endeavor, nor are they storage friendly. Two years ago Facebook was buying 1 NetApp 3070 storage devices each week at a cost of $2 million. Today, that number has grown to 4 per week. All of this has helped the company “NetApp” (NTAP) grow like a weed as it leads EMC in enterprise storage for startups. You better believe if Facebook, Twitter and Groupon are using NetApp’s storage appliances, most other growing startups will follow suit.

Secondly, as Facebook surpasses the 400 million user mark, bandwidth usage is skyrocketing. On top of that, the speed of how fast a site loads effects how Google ranks the website. It is ever so more important that websites use fast CDN’s to help deliver their content to their users at a lightning speed. I know this because of the massive bandwidth usage at Tatto Media, including all of the countries we serve within, there is no way it would be cost effective to have servers in every country. At Tatto Media, we use Akamai (AKAM) to help speed up our content delivery in all countries we host. Forget Limelight – we used it and found it to be extremely slow. Unless you plan on building out your own datacenters like Google, Akamai is the way to go and is by far the leading choice for most tech startups by a wide margin.

You don’t need to wait; invest in infrastructure that will fuel this next tech bubble which is sure to be twice as big as 99. However, be smart with who you choose to invest in. Don’t just invest in any infrastructure players, invest in the leader. Think about if you were a well-funded startup, would use second tier technology while your peers are using the best of the best? Absolutely not!

For proper disclosure, I do own AKAM and NTAP.

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