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“It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

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Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#111

Post by pjc50 »

michaelt wrote: post #100
sheeshkebab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's with justifying an existence of a company by having employees? If a company is profitable and you as an owner are doing well financially, does it really matter?

For reasons outside my area of expertise, UK companies sometimes divide themselves into numerous sub-companies. This produces the result that publicly traded company Tesco PLC has a great many sub-companies [1]. This is at odds with a lot of expectations about how companies are counted. [1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/officers/uZl4-qVGUWaBK3Jd...

Tax is the usual one. That list also includes a lot of closed or dormant subsidiaries. Perhaps it's best to think of them as being like AWS VMs that get provisioned and de-provisioned, some with short lives. Tesco is complicated by takeovers that haven't been fully incorporated; I see a lot of familiar brand names in that list, and a whole other pile of fragments of Booker (giant wholesalers recently taken over)

I tried https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07530494/filing-h... based on "EBT" in the name (tax shelter scheme), but it's a dormant empty shell.

TESCO GREY (2LP) LIMITED https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/FC027196 registered in the Cayman Islands? Obvious tax shelter of some sort. Also closed.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#112

Post by pjc50 »

michaelmcmillan wrote: post #93
PandaRider wrote: post #8

I'm shaking my head right now because I can't believe people at the top is still susceptible to sampling/survivorship bias. I've tried searching but cannot find a good empirical study of privilege and entrepreneurship correlation. However, I've found an essay paper [0] that exactly predicted this twitter drama; that entrepreneurs simultaneously present and erase this conversation about class and entrepreneurship. The…

In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains––so how do we differentiate the privilege we got from our "class" from the traits we were born with? Does privilege imply that you got it from your "class"? This seems like a classic nature/nurture fallacy.

Privilege is not a trait. You cannot look at a person in isolation and say whether they have it or not. It's a property of how other people relate to them in society.

White skin is something you're born with. White privilege is what happens when you live in a society that assumes that black people are more likely to be criminals than white people, so you get a more favourable reception when you walk in a room.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#114

Post by unityByFreedom »

adamlett wrote: post #82
tomp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's saying more something along the lines of "women can be elite performers too " (and that being genetically/on average less strong shouldn't stop them from trying) - which isn't entirely wrong, especially since we're already talking about like 0.01% of the population (successful entrepreneurs / elite sports(wo)men).

Don't get blinded by the analogy. There's an important difference between it and the problem we're discussing: We can't actually change the fact that woman generally are not as strong as men. We can however as a society change the fact that many people don't have a safety net. I appreciate that Paul G's intended meaning was different, but it's kind of hard not to interpret what he wrote, as no, we don't actually have…

> it's kind of hard not to interpret what he wrote, as no, we don't actually have to change society [which has worked well for me], poor or underprivileged people just have to try harder.

Spot on. He could have said "hey, maybe you're right, privileged is a factor, and I was only thinking in terms of wealth." Instead he was defensive.

Public discourse is a great influencer, provided you have the ability to be influenced. If you don't, then you carve a rough path for yourself, whether you're small time or big time.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#115

Post by StavrosK »

cbanek wrote: post #108

Pretty disappointed in PG's response: "I would ordinarily just let your bullshit go, but this myth that you have to be a rich kid to start a startup is terribly dangerous, because it discourages people who aren't from trying it. Brian Chesky's parents were social workers. That is not a rich kid." As if having two parents with stable jobs isn't considered a safety net. I agree, you don't need to be rich, but I also ag…

Agreed, "I can't pay rent and I'll have to move to my parents' basement" and "I can't pay rent and I'll have to live on the street" are two very different ways of struggling to pay rent.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#116

Post by grenoire »

shafyy wrote: post #105
DevX101 wrote: post #37

They're talking past each other. Thing is, they're both right. Paul seems to be saying you don't have to be rich to do a startup. Matthew is saying lots of founder have some resources (family home, savings, great education, i.e. middle-class) that made doing a startup feasible Both these positions are true and aren't incompatible. Being middle class (Matthew's position) and prudent with savings can afford you probabl…

The problem is PG says that you don't have to be a rich kid, and then takes Airbnb as an example where the founders are definitely rich kids compared to the rest of the nation and world (not rich as in "daddy has a private jet", but definitely in the top couple of percent). Of course PG is right that you don't need to be a rich kid, but he chose his anecdote poorly. PS: Also Sam recently said (in the StrictlyVC inter…

Worldwide, definitely top 0.1% (at approx. 80K annual income).

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#117

Post by lazyjones »

cbanek wrote: post #108

Pretty disappointed in PG's response: "I would ordinarily just let your bullshit go, but this myth that you have to be a rich kid to start a startup is terribly dangerous, because it discourages people who aren't from trying it. Brian Chesky's parents were social workers. That is not a rich kid." As if having two parents with stable jobs isn't considered a safety net. I agree, you don't need to be rich, but I also ag…

Why is it disappointing to that he points out that "having a safety net" and "being rich" are different things? The whole thread seems to revolve around people trying to misunderstand him deliberately in order to post their "progressive" complaints.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#118

Post by KaiserPro »

buro9 wrote: post #85
PandaRider wrote: post #8

I'm shaking my head right now because I can't believe people at the top is still susceptible to sampling/survivorship bias. I've tried searching but cannot find a good empirical study of privilege and entrepreneurship correlation. However, I've found an essay paper [0] that exactly predicted this twitter drama; that entrepreneurs simultaneously present and erase this conversation about class and entrepreneurship. The…

> class may be a more powerful organizing discourse Yes! Yes! Yes! Other things contribute to class, but it remains a class issue. I'm reminded of this: "If your feminism isn’t intersectional, it isn't feminism.". We need something similar for those who think the issue is one-dimensional - "the poor". Because why someone is poor, and what conditions and circumstances result from being poor... poverty (which includes…

In the US, Class is a pretty good proxy to wealth, far more than say the UK.

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#119

Post by ahje »

Jhsto wrote: post #84
jacquesm wrote: post #2

How do countries with good social safety nets factor in here? In EU people are definitely not nearly as likely to start their own business as in the US, and many people that would otherwise be labelled 'jobless' (or on the dole) are 'self employed' instead.

My anecdote is from a Finnish perspective: First things first, some people make more money being unemployed than working (though for only short periods of times, to my knowledge max. couple months). This is related to entrepreneurship because owning a company, whether it makes any money or not, labels you to the workforce. This is problematic because it obliterates your unemployment aids. In some circumstances, this…

> https://imgur.com/a/o5MGARc

The really bad part is that your spouse will lose most benefits if you start a business (because it's automatically considered to be a family business apparently).

Re: “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

#120

Post by StavrosK »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #19
KaiserPro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only data I can get is this: https://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educati... 93% had a degree, with 30% having a masters, That would suggest to me that you'd need a decent wedge of cash. Now, what is interesting, is that in 2016 at least, the US created gross 960k new companies (there is some smoothing here, so +- 100k) The UK created 460k. Seeing as how the UK is 60 million, versus 300 million pe…

Registering a company in the UK, and keeping it running, is both simpler and cheaper than in the US. Registering a company takes a few minutes and costs less than $30. Compulsory annual filing costs less than $20. If your company's revenue is below some threshold, you don't need to register for VAT (similar to sales tax). And there's another (even higher) threshold below which you can file very simple annual accounts…

Agreed, I founded a UK company on a whim one day so I can bill for some freelancing work. It made a few thousand a year and everything was hassle-free, basically "pay $50/yr and file some stuff that tells us you're active, and when you get large enough to afford a good accountant they'll take care of it".
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