81–90 of 121 posts
The employee market does penalize generalists, those who lack political savvy (ADHD, OCD), and/or those who do not come from well off families and connections.
In the US, inventors (not the same as entrepreneur, but often related) are also disproportionately likely to be immigrants > We find immigrants represent 16 percent of all US inventors, but produced 23 percent of total innovation output, as measured by number of patents, patent citations, and the economic value of these patents. Immigrant inventors are more likely to rely on foreign technologies, to collaborate with…
Being a tech entrepreneur seemed so cool in the early 2000s. Tech salaries have exploded so much since then that you're better off with an office job in terms of risk vs. reward, or maybe youtube or substack for those who want to be more entrepreneurial but without owning a business. The whole LLC/business plan route is not as important as it used to be unless you actually think you can create the next Square, Stripe…
I left a 6 figure engineering job to build my own startup with my wife. For the past 5 years, we spent 2/3rds of our savings on it and almost didn’t take vacation. This year we finally reached ramen profitability. When I look at where we would be if I had kept the job, we would be homeowners, be able to buy new clothes regularly, go to restaurants and take awesome vacations a few times a year. But the missing thing w…
"In pursuit of that subject, we’ve studied companies from around the world, across industries, and at different stages of maturation, hopping from Starbucks to Stripe, Y Combinator to Flexport, Rappi to Kaspi, and DST to TSMC." A curious sample. Unfortunately these types of "studies" omit the bulk of entrepreneurs that keep an economy running. Small businesses, 5-50 employees, that tick on without the glory and fame…
It might be the actual research is more diverse, but they plucked out examples that were more likely to get people interested. Bob's Extruding in Elbow, Alabama might be a key plastic component supplier for the global economy, but nobody's heard of it.
It’s an interesting article. In my view, Non-conformists start companies. Possibly aggressive non-conformists most of all. In my personal case, I made many questionable choices, including turning down a job at Microsoft in the nineties (would have been better financially) and leaving multiple great jobs (one of which afforded me corporate apartments in Honolulu and London) to risk everything multiple times to start m…
Not especially non-conformists - non-conformity is merely a symptom. As you say, risk seeking behavior, resulting from the actual cause: "poor risk assessment" - ties right in to difficult childhood, mental health issues, and the market misjudging you (all causes or signs of trauma and being outside the norm). I say this as someone with an appetite for trying new things, being non-conformist, and adventure sports - c…
To work as an actuary, it is better if you are rather on the risk-averse side (i.e. err into this direction instead of having a tendency for excellent and accurate risk estimation) because insurance companies and regulatory authorities are very biased into this direction.
I left a 6 figure engineering job to build my own startup with my wife. For the past 5 years, we spent 2/3rds of our savings on it and almost didn’t take vacation. This year we finally reached ramen profitability. When I look at where we would be if I had kept the job, we would be homeowners, be able to buy new clothes regularly, go to restaurants and take awesome vacations a few times a year. But the missing thing w…
I left a 6 figure engineering job to build my own startup with my wife. For the past 5 years, we spent 2/3rds of our savings on it and almost didn’t take vacation. This year we finally reached ramen profitability. When I look at where we would be if I had kept the job, we would be homeowners, be able to buy new clothes regularly, go to restaurants and take awesome vacations a few times a year. But the missing thing w…
One category that I didn't see a lot of is the fully-employed side-hustler, so that may also exist with a completely different set of characteristics.
Incidentally, according to the article, I should be a prototypical entrepreneur, and I've certainly always known this, but, wow, the level of misery I experienced from everybody close to me has been overwhelming every time I've started anything. I've been 'lucky' in the sense of finding some kind of a way into a job when it got to be too much. I've been homeless, I've been to war, I've done ultramarathons, but this is nothing compared to the more normal types of people problems that nobody ever talks about. My plan had always been to make only enough money to survive for a few years of freedom. It turns out that this was easy, but didn't solve the right problem.
As a non-success, I still consider myself one of the lucky ones. I've seen people, who seemed to have it much better than I, get into much worse situations, and several didn't survive it. Steve jobs said you can't connect the dots to success looking forward, and this is obviously also true of disaster. It's easy to forget about these people, or only remember the bad dots.
I think about what to tell my son about all of this. I want him to never feel forced into anything. If he feels good about a job or a relationship, he should feel happy to continue it. But he should know that those things may change to hurt him, and he should never get into a situation where he feels stuck. One important thing about this is that I believe that the law and the culture is strongly against him, and seems to be getting worse. He should not expect success in this environment, and I'd advise that it may be wise to go somewhere less hostile, even at the expense of financial opportunity. Most young people don't realize that the majority of middle-aged men in this country are legally barred from leaving their state of residence without permission.
So the conditions for success seem simple, and the people that win big often don't seem very impressive, but the failure conditions are often larger and more hidden than most people understand early in life. You're not competing just with your mind, but your entire life situation to support your ideas.