My favorite example of this is when there were all these books and articles in the 00s that were like "Google's Business Secrets" and "The Google Way". And then I remember a Google employee being interviewed and saying something along the lines of "To understand 'The Google Secret', pretend you have a giant basement full of money, and then whenever you pull bags of money out of that basement (to hire the best people, afford great perks, spend on the latest hardware, etc.), the basement magically fills up with money again. That's 'the Google Secret', and if your company doesn't have a massive revenue stream like that, a lot of their advice won't work for you"
“Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
131–140 of 232 posts
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do talk about that. Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.
He comes from emerald wealth in South Africa for christ sake. Maybe he cleaned manure, but not out of dire need
Given that the mine was worth 40,000 pounds and stopped producing in 1989 it wasn't exactly a great source of wealth.
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it does, the second paragraph in my original response states just that. This doesnt negate the fact that some people are exponentially better at business than others. Its the same in math, chess, basketball, football, writing, and every other human endeavor
> This doesnt negate the fact that some people are exponentially better at business than others. Its the same in math, chess, basketball, football, writing, and every other human endeavor Citing chess directly contradicts your thesis about "innate talent". In chess, the Polgar sisters are proof that training is the key and not genetics. The increasing existence of younger and younger chess grandmasters distributed ar…
I do wonder about the Polgar sisters case. By any measure their parents were also pretty exceptional individuals - just read the Wikipedia page - which is a huge confounding variable. Maybe “being laser focussed about raising a child genius” is a trait that manifests as “being laser focused at getting good at chess” when inherited!
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#134This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…
Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.
>Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.
That’s not true in my experience. I’m a similar case, have started 8 businesses in 30 years. Most have had some level of success: enough pay my employees and provide good healthcare while also making a (often small) profit. I’ve also had 2 exits, one of which generatied a life-changing amount of money for my co-founder and myself. Of the 6 business that did not exit, 2 failed to start, 2 achieved multi-million dollar revenue levels then failed, 2 somewhere in the middle.
In between startups I worked for other companies. I tried to optimize $/hr while I did, rebuilding my reserves and even my credit (lost everything once)
Working for others after a failed startup has many benefits. You look at company leadership differently. You observe. You learn. You make more connections. You see more market opportunities. You get inspired. You try again.
Probably key in being able to do this cycle well is to not let the businesses get over leveraged. I’ve had both funded and non-funded businesses. I’ve gone nearly broke a couple of times but a big part of learning to be an entrepreneur is learning to manage money.
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#135Individual entrepreneurship is not a scalable or reliable way to ensure a decent standard of living for large populations.
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making a lot of assumptions.
No they're not. Just the self-admitted fact that they could afford to fail 5-7 times creating a business shows that they had more social and financial safety net than an average American. Most Americans can't just create a business, fail, and repeat it 4-6 more times.
[1] is interesting - suggests that 32% of American adults getting a surprise $400 bill would require them to borrow, sell something, or be unable to pay it.
Which is quite the statistic when you think about it.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-economic-we...
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#137Cynical take, but probably popular in today's social media. I don't think it's right to say building a company is only based on random chance. It clearly also involves at least some skill.
Saying it's only based on luck is clearly wrong. Saying no luck is involved is clearly wrong.
You have just repeated what I said.
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
He also had substantially wealthy parents if I'm not mistaken. Same with Gates and others. This is the ultimate safety net. It's easier to take risks when you have an out when it all goes really wrong. Doubt he'd still be cleaning manure today if he hadn't had a success...
I'm reminded of the song Common People by Pulp: "But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."
The album in general holds up well, good stuff.
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#139I only ever found one foolproof system to win the lottery, and it allowed me to win on every single ticket. I owned a retail store that sold lottery tickets. The retailer gets a small commission on every sale, and one on any ticket cashed in at the store.
This is basically the same as the VC fund model. They get annual carry (ie percentage) on every fund, and then get a percentage of the gains for every exit. Often this is "two and twenty" (aka 2% annual carry, plus 20% of the gains). Pretty awesome skimming.
A shocking number of VC's still fail to make much money. The amount of effort to source and manage investments eats up a whole lot of those management fees, and the 20% carry is often after preferential returns up to a certain level and a lot of funds never reach that level.
(I worked for a VC until end of last year; still years of waiting to see if the carry I vested will pay out anything at all)
Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice
#140Since when do we consider single viral Tweets to be worth HN main page?
It's generated a lot of illuminating commentary and that's surely worthy?