121–130 of 384 posts
It's easy to take risks when there's little to lose. If the only fallout is wasting some family money and at worst delaying your entry-level career by a couple of years for some experience that many employers consider valuable anyway, there's little downside to throwing the dice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UK also makes company formation very easy and still slightly advantageous for sole traders, which may be a factor. I did check the criteria and they do include "must be listed for VAT or PAYE", so they're all real businesses to some extent and not just shells. The US would do well to look at its business licensing requirements to see if they could be simplified in terms of paperwork.
It's also cheap and trivial to form a UK company with bank account - no matter whether UK citizen/resident or not.
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.
On the other side, many young people end up having to help their parents make rent. They don't have the position to take on any of their own risk.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing your great grandfather’s situation to a poor person today doesn’t make sense to me. Their choices, consequences, and access to information are vastly different.
There's less risk today. If your company fails, you're in debt, but you probably won't die in a ditch. So why not jump feet first into what you want to do? To quote the eminent Shia LeBouf "It's you're life, don't let your dreams be dreams. Just do it"
When there's little/no social net when you fail, failure is disastrous.
I'm diabetic. I'm nearly chained to a company with a decent medical plan, since our "wonderful" country has little to impetus to fix medicine. So failing means 'not able to go to the doctor and not afford my drugs'.
Failure also means 'not affording rent'.
Failure also means being unemployed, and no way to get unemployment.
So where being a business owner means it could free my way out of poverty, the %success rate for me absolutely must be balanced with the failure rate and the ramifications aforementioned.
When someone uses the word “privilege” it’s a good indicator that the rest of the discussion is going to be a waste of time.
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…
Interestingly, only a quarter of the businesses are employers in UK, so most of the company creation is presumably basically city of London financial engineering :-)
2) A UK limited company is a flexible financial wrapper for all sorts of organisations, many of which aren't businesses in the traditional sense. A significant number of community groups are registered as limited companies rather than charities, even if they are run on an entirely voluntary basis.
3) The extreme convenience of the British system and relatively favourable tax rates mean that a lot of foreign companies choose to incorporate in the UK, even if they have no presence there. Until the introduction of the mini-GmbH in 2008, many German small businesses chose to incorporate in the UK, because dealing with the cross-border issues was easier than dealing with German bureaucracy. If I were a startup founder based in a developing or middle-income country, my first impulse would be to open a UK limited company - it takes about 20 minutes, costs about £20 and gives you a sound basis to operate as an international business.
4) The annual returns for a small limited company are so straightforward that it's often easier to keep a company dormant rather than formally wind it up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I does factor in, it is somewhat hard to see because startups will always be marginal. In Sweden both Markus Persson (Minecraft) and Daniel Ek (Spotify) come from non-privileged background, with little university experience. When you see this in the US it is usually that someone got into a well known school first, with the contacts that bring.
Anyone who was born a citizen of Sweden is highly privileged on a global level. Compare with anyone from a developing country and it's easy to see all of the advantages that enabled those fortunes to be made.
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.