131–140 of 384 posts
I like to think Swedens extensive social safety nets are a factor to the large number of startups here.
Most people, even poor people, have parents who would help them out in case of need. They seem to be discussing a pretty low bar here. And of course it is a "privilege" to have supporting parents. So what? If you don't have that privilege, what are you supposed to do? Kill yourself? I think such privilege discussions are rather silly. What's the point? That people should be showered with tax payer money to even out t…
All parent, regardless of class/richness want to be supportive. the question is what support can they offer? Sure, a sofa, most people have that. But thats not a long term solution. What if your parents don't have any savings, how will they help you with that debt?
They can't
Its not an issue of will, its an issue of possibility.
Now, I intensely dislike the use of "privilege", as its more often than not tool to stop discourse. But, to assume that every parent is _capable_ of providing long term accommodation, financial, transport or other support is shore sighted at best.
I suggest perhaps you might want to expand your social circle, so you can see this sort of thing first hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Betting is a reasonable choice when you, like a VC can bet on a ton of options and still have cash left for immediate problems. All other times, betting is playing your luck and bound to fail.
First, I don't want to read to much into the OP regarding betting. Because there is something to it. Without risks no rewards. Yet what constitutes a risk and a reward differ significantly based on your resources. That being said, risking some of your resources, money, time, whatever, to get out of poverty is reasonable. Betting on a start-up might not be. Simply because if it goes wrong instead of rewards there migh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains No, but our privileged parents did contribute to them, and their our upbringing, early months, lack of childhood stress over things as food and war, familial support, good schools, and so on. Brains is hardly the best contributor to entrepreneurial success. In fact a plot of IQ vs success I've seen plotted looked li…
Induction gets you nowhere though: where did our privileged parents get their brains from? You're proving my point here: we inherit roughly 50% of our traits through our parent's genes. I never claimed IQ was the best measure (surprised it looked like random noise though), but certainly our cognitive traits matter . So to my question: How do you distinguish that privilege from the privilege you got from your "class"?…
I had to borrow money from my mom to pay my taxes I would agree that in some US locations the taxes are a bit too high...
A poor person betting everything on their startup is definitely good for pg - it increases the pool of people whose work he can profit from. It's not that obvious if it's good for the poor person. I guess that everybody has their own risk aversion threshold.
It is probably not actually good for PG, because the majority of such people will fail and end up destitute, casting bad publicity (rightly or wrongly, doesn’t matter) on whatever start-up churner generated that outcome. Additionally, founders who already come from wealth or have political connections, etc., are probably much more likely to succees in the financial senses that PG wants. The only limited sense in whic…
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…
Anything more than a "fuck off" from PG was charitable.
A poor person betting everything on their startup is definitely good for pg - it increases the pool of people whose work he can profit from. It's not that obvious if it's good for the poor person. I guess that everybody has their own risk aversion threshold.
A poor person not betting on anything is bound to stay poor. Your point is?
And the poor know this. And yet, they still have literally everything to lose if they fail. They don't want to be poor, but being poor is better than being with absolutely nothing.
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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…
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It's also cheap and trivial to form a UK company with bank account - no matter whether UK citizen/resident or not.
Filing for a company was trivial when I did it, but not many banks would give it an account (NatWest/Barclays/etc wouldn't). Has this changed?