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Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
181–190 of 317 posts
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#182It takes very little money to start an internet company these days. If you dont have the capital, work and save it. Stop making excuses.
But not everyone can afford to have a business fail. And most do.
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#183You need Cash/Caste to succeed as an Entrepreneur in India; http://goo.gl/NFK0A
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a very similar story, except I'm on part one. Recent graduate, very modest family, and drank all the Paul G koolaid which got me to jump into the whole scene just to realize I'm mostly surrounded by upper middle class types where there's still risk being taken just not nearly as much. This has taught me to always consider the source of advice more rigorously. I still think he's a great thinker, but some of the…
The lesson from this is don't drink anyone's kool aid consciously. PG has a huge incentive to wax heroic about the "risk takers" "makers" and "founders"; it's the Silicon Valley cargo cult, and should be compensated against in the mind of the reader. Always be brutally critical of applying the question of qui bono-- always, no exceptions, ever. PG has little incentive to explicitly qualify ideas that are his foundati…
>honestly it's quite annoying to have someone tell you so with the intention of taking you down a peg.
This is why a lot of HNers flag articles about privilege, sexism, etc.
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might (or might not) be true materially; but I would not ignore the psychological effects of growing up financially secure vs. not, and what it tends to do to your capacity to take financial risks specifically. If you don't even hardly know what it feels like to have no safety net at all, if you know you do have a safety net in the form of family that will help you out if things get _really_ bad, at least to kee…
Sorry but that's just such a small part. I have spoken to a friend who has rich parents, and the psychological effect is that they always know if something goes wrong they can just be supported by their rich parents when they get back on their feet. Furthermore they know they can bum around until their parents die and get their retirement money in the form of inheritance. You might be surprised how ever-present that…
>I have spoken to a friend
I wish people wouldn't speak this confidently with such little life experience.
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#186Ten years back, when I was fresh out of college, I joined a startup - not as a founder but as the first employee. A lot of it was driven by reading Paul Graham's essays, and I was naive and immature enough to believe that I was doing something great (as an aside, I came from an economically disadvantaged family; and every cent of my assets today is something I have earned and not something which I have inherited or o…
Thirty-five years back, I went to work as the fourth person in a start-up (that's still in business) and loved the fast-paced environment of a start-up life. Fifteen years ago, I went to work for "BigCo", and while our group was essentially an internally funded start-up, I hated the politics, especially as we acquired other companies and tried to integrate their software products into ours. The good news is that succ…
Do people really believe that their upper-middle class upbringings offered no advantages other than cash?
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although your parents built their business from scratch, they benefited from a social, cultural and economic background which led them to more easily attempt and succeed at starting a business. I am a business owner myself, not coming from a high-income family. I am now part of a network of young entrepreneur/lending scheme for innovative business. A wild guess: 75% of our alumni come from privileged environment: 50%…
I think our scale and perspective, by being in tech, can be skewed. Over 540,000 new businesses are started EACH MONTH in the US. The sheer number of them should be evidence enough that the vast majority are not started in the context of privilege, wealth or perhaps even a safety net that protects the would-be-entrepreneur from failure. I just don't think this world view is correct. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonn…
Sure, but this being HN, we're interested in the "disrupt an entire industry" type business, which are overwhelmingly started by people with good connections and a top university degree that hasn't burdened them with unsustainable debt. Not to mention overwhelmingly involving people who have chosen to relocate to the highest cost of living parts of the US to try to get on the radar of VCs, and are foregoing the >$100k a year they could easily command in a regular job there.
Obviously there are opportunity costs and expectations associated with starting your own plumbing business too, but entrepreneurially minded tradesmen or professional services providers not only possess a higher chance of success, but also much more willingness to shut it down and get a job if it's not generating revenue quickly.
And by the time you get to "half a billion entrepreneurs" worldwide we're including people offering goods and services to sale not because of the lure of entrepreneurdom but simply because that's pretty much the only opportunity to earn money that exists in their locality.
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this article is trying to down play successful ventures from non-stereotypical entrepreneurs but it's making the argument that that the image of the bold, risk taking entrepreneur might not be so accurate in the sense that that aren't really risking that much. It doesn't say that all successful entrepreneurs are white, male and privileged. It just says that a lot of them are and that the largest indicato…
I understand this issue perfectly. In the referenced comic strip, I am Paula on the right and my children are on the left side. What is left out in that strip, is that because of the way I grew up, I am left with a drive to accomplish things that I simply do not see in my own children. The hunger, the drive, the ambition are all from a crappy childhood. The drive is where my success came from, it is what gets me off…
My parents own a 2 million+ dollar house in Saratoga and raised me like a starving immigrant. Maybe the drive comes from the parenting style. ;)
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a very similar story, except I'm on part one. Recent graduate, very modest family, and drank all the Paul G koolaid which got me to jump into the whole scene just to realize I'm mostly surrounded by upper middle class types where there's still risk being taken just not nearly as much. This has taught me to always consider the source of advice more rigorously. I still think he's a great thinker, but some of the…
Agree. The risk of having to run back to mummy and daddy with their tail between their legs is no risk at all. I could be quite entrepreneurial if I didn't also have to pay for my apartment and food every month without fail.
But from a broader social standpoint, isn't it a good thing that people who can afford to take risks are the ones taking the risks? It sucks on an individual basis if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't risk failure, but it's not such a bad thing that the affluent are taking larger economic risks than the poor.
Re: Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk – they come from families with money
#190I wonder how that explains the fairly high risk averseness in the Scandinavian countries? It's literally safe to fail yet failing is frowned upon. I don't think that article is telling the right story.
Isn't Finland supposed to have a pretty bustling tech scene?