171–180 of 384 posts
To be honest, I don't think that starting your company with the "risk" that you might move back in with your parents if it fails... is at all a meaningful 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…
Totally agree. I have great ideas of things to work on, but I'm essentially a single income household (my wife is in grad school, and her part time pay barely covers her education and school). I can't quit my job and work on a dream venture, who will pay for my wife's upcoming childbirth and related expenses? Who will ensure we can still make payments on our home and food? Living with parents is definitely a safety n…
What is the product/service you want to develop? Do you have a defined potential customer (friend/family)?
It's something you can create putting 1-2 hours per day?
What is the minimum amount of work you need to put in to go and show it to someone (even if it is a mockup)
How many customers do you need to break even?
You can do ALL of this and more without quitting your job.
Twitter wins again. We keep reducing these complex multivariate social issues to simple cause-effect situations then beating one another up over what the simple cause is. When we're doing definitions, the key phrase is "necessary and sufficient" In this case, being rich or poor is neither necessary nor sufficient since we have plenty of examples of things working out with either of these two things being missing. So…
I get the impression that the only reason Twitter isn't as heavily scrutinized as Facebook is because their executives are simply more likable, which isn't a high bar to pass when you look at Mark Zuckerberg. I think the same applies to Google, too.
The reality is that money lets you "take risks," and money gives you options (in this world). To be honest, I don't think that starting your company with the "risk" that you might move back in with your parents if it fails... is at all a meaningful risk.
How many 18-30 year olds do you see having a swing at it and trying something, vs 30+ people with families and savings to burn?
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…
Paul said you don't have to be rich. Matthew responded as if he'd said that it's not beneficial to have a safety net. That's putting a statement in to his mouth that he did not make. Anything more than a "fuck off" from PG was charitable.
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…
1-Life isn't fair 2-Some people start the game 50 tiles ahead of you.
None of these reasons are going to stop me (a poor entrepreneur) to build the company I want to build.
I think PG's comment is idiotic, but I think he is very smart.
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.
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…
This is a kind of No True Scotsman fallacy. Anyone that is successful was 'advantaged' because her family was rich, or she had two parents, or she had a parent, or she was born in America, or she was born with the right number of chromosomes... The whole conversation strikes me as just snarky and reductive. I don't see the point. Why not try to promote a conversation to lift people up and empower them rather than wri…
It's true that a wide variety of things contribute to someone's success, and many of them are outside of their power. Being able to acknowledge this can be taken to the extreme, but all of your statements are entirely valid assessments to make that have real effects on how realistically difficult a task may have been- or if the task was possible at all.