151–160 of 279 posts
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if you doubt that, I recommend living under high stress conditions for a couple years and see for yourself
What about living with no financial stress for the rest of your life, maybe it balances things out?
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> Gotta disagree with this. As someone who grew up middle class, I was fortunate, in a lot of ways, to also learn to be prudent with money. I started bootstrapping microbusinesses with almost no monetary investment. This eventually allowed me to support myself (on a very low budget), and then, later, on a slightly larger budget. Eventually, one of these businesses became successful enough to support a family comforta…
The whole point of the post you're responding to is that it's not a random outcome; it's an outcome driven by a strategy that is specifically useful for people with $0 in the bank and middle class connections. You're talking about $300k in the bank, but the quote you included literally says "almost no monetary investment."
Do you think other poor people trying to start businesses don't try to do it with "almost no monetary investment"? Not only they try that, that's the only way they can afford to try anyway.
Still no match for a big monetary investment, and still much much harder for them to get the same outcomes as an enterpreneur coming from privilege. Notice also how the claim isn't that it's impossible (or inversely, that the rich always succeed to build a succesful business), but that it is much much harder, and the upper middle class/rich/connections people have it much easier.
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“ I have definitely lost a few years of life expectancy “ Why? Genuinely curious. Stress can lower life expectancy?
It definitely does, but even a decade of high stress vs not having to worry about money for the rest of your life could be a very fair stress trade.
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> Middle class kids can afford one throw. Gotta disagree with this. As someone who grew up middle class, I was fortunate, in a lot of ways, to also learn to be prudent with money. I started bootstrapping microbusinesses with almost no monetary investment. This eventually allowed me to support myself (on a very low budget), and then, later, on a slightly larger budget. Eventually, one of these businesses became succes…
I think you missed the point. As middle class you can't fail with your dart, you are either lucky or good with it. Maybe you are part of the latter, but if you miss your shot you are fucked in either case. Wealthy people can be damn bad with it but keep trying until it works, and if you are rich enough you don't even need to hit the center once and keep going.
If you're middle class, maybe you can't take shot after shot at the full distance, but you can start close to the target and incrementally step further away. To mix analogies, there's nothing in business that says you have to swing for the fences on your first attempt.
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> Middle class kids can afford one throw. Gotta disagree with this. As someone who grew up middle class, I was fortunate, in a lot of ways, to also learn to be prudent with money. I started bootstrapping microbusinesses with almost no monetary investment. This eventually allowed me to support myself (on a very low budget), and then, later, on a slightly larger budget. Eventually, one of these businesses became succes…
This goes back to Jim Collins book Great by Choice and the idea of Bullets then Cannonballs. [1]"First, you fire bullets (low-cost, low-risk, low-distraction experiments) to figure out what will work—calibrating your line of sight by taking small shots. Then, once you have empirical validation, you fire a cannonball (concentrating resources into a big bet) on the calibrated line of sight. Calibrated cannonballs corre…
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> Middle class kids can afford one throw. Gotta disagree with this. As someone who grew up middle class, I was fortunate, in a lot of ways, to also learn to be prudent with money. I started bootstrapping microbusinesses with almost no monetary investment. This eventually allowed me to support myself (on a very low budget), and then, later, on a slightly larger budget. Eventually, one of these businesses became succes…
How did you make rent while you were bootstrapping?
As most commenters note, the youth aspect is a big differentiator for the middle class. All this is hard as soon as a family is in the picture, health concerns go up, etc. (And for some, those happen even sooner, but not most.) Frustratingly, most successful entrepreneurs are much older, so a case of "youth is wasted on the young."
Source: Had a 5 figure income in the bay area for years and it was fine until it wasn't.
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good…
> Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it. Aren't many first-generation immigrants (Koreans etc.) in the US entrepreneurs? They're certainly not middle class, and yet they make in it the business world.
Being the recipient of the sacrifice of two capable people is not a state of poverty.
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How did you make rent while you were bootstrapping?
In the US, you can part-time consult, as programmers are paid way above the national median income. This can either be in a lucrative field, giving you more time, or in your vertical, giving you more pmf exposure. The result is living like a normal US person, though not necessarily your peer group. As most commenters note, the youth aspect is a big differentiator for the middle class. All this is hard as soon as a fa…
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good…
I see this story repeated over and and over again on the internet, but I don't really see it playing out the same way in the real world.
I've seen a lot of "rich kids" try to start businesses, but then quickly realize that it's a huge amount of work and not guaranteed success. Then they look around and see all of their opportunities for safe, high-paying jobs that leverage their expensive education and their parents' network, and decide that taking one of those jobs is a much easier way forward.
I lived near a highly ranked MBA school for a while. I would constantly get LinkedIn requests from stereotypical "rich kid" MBA grads who banded together and wanted to "do a startup", but they just needed a few engineers to actually do all the work. It was funny to hear the pitches about how they'd give me 1-5% for doing all of the tech work of their company while all of them (up to 7, in one case) would handle the business side of things for me. No thanks.
There are definitely some "rich kid" startup founders out there, but a lot of the founders I've worked with over the years came more from the end of the spectrum where they grew up learning how to work hard, that money doesn't come easy, that they can't rely on parents to bail them out, and so on.
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That's not how most generational wealth was created. From mobsters that went "legit" (Bronfmans, Kennedys...) to people who build their fortunes off war profiteering, slavery, genocide, child labor... They weren't grinding away for 40-100 years at some labor job. They exploited people, captured the gains, then used the power law to stay on the top.
Similar to the other post, Every American who passes a house to their decendents has built some level of generational wealth. There are a lot more people in this bucket than the Kennedy wealth bucket