Well, I think that your reason for existence still persists, but the methods for achieving that existence have changed. The internet has made all markets more "efficient," so that marketing executives need to figure out better ways to let people shopping for their product/service discover them through search engines, blogs, etc. ...The good news for a startup is that you do not need to have a huge distribution organization to find potential customers in this day and age if you can get good at "modern" marketing techniques.

Markets being more efficient means that customers know better what is actually going on, and marketroids have less influence over their perceptions. Sure, there are still horrid inefficiencies, like the 1000% markup on eyeglasses, but 19dollarglasses.com and the like has begun to close that inefficiency. It isn't that marketing has changed media, like the expansion into TV advertising from radio and paper; it's that marketing fundamentally is waning in effectiveness as people have more ways of communicating honestly as people, rather than as marketing departments.

As a result, the startup looking for potential customers not only doesn't need a huge distribution organization, it doesn't even need to get good at "modern marketing techniques," since most successfully marketed products, particularly on the internet, have succeeded because they were better, not because they used hip new marketing techniques. Even PR is ineffective at penetrating actual blogs, although it still has an effect on old-style newspapers that have been webified.