Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 46 posts

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#31

Post by edw519 »

diN0bot wrote: post #30
edw519 wrote: post #24

He forgot a few: 1. A guy who threw daddy's money at the ridiculous idea that people would buy books without seeing or touching them first. 2. Two college nerds who thought people would use a TV screen instead of the yellow pages. 3. Two more college nerds who thought people would come to their web-site solely for the purpose of going to someone else's website. 4. Another college nerd who thought people could be frie…

pretty funny until i got to #6. your use of "pussy-whipped" in this case is demeaning to both the man and the woman, and didn't fit with the rest of the comment's tone.

You're right, sorry. I was having so much fun I got carried away. I'd edit it, but it's too late now.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#32

Post by bitwize »

A service where some woman (who isn’t under 25 or very well dressed herself) plays “queer eye” for a dude over webcam and demeans him into buying her choice of clothes.

At first I thought this referred to one of those "financial domination" sites where you pay to be humiliated and ignored by some girl over the internet. Now that's entrepreneurship, American style!

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#33

Post by sireat »

bonsaitree wrote: post #26

It's from Business Week. 'Nuff said. Business Week is to business journalism what Mariah Carey is to business journalism.

Slightly offtopic, Bloomberg just bought Business Week for a song: roughly 2-5 million. It will be interesting to see what changes happen at the magazine.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/20...

Personally, I always found BW too bland, compared to Forbes.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#34

Post by jfarmer »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #28
zaidf wrote: post #23

Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an authoritative list that took into account all entrepreneurs across America. Untrue. May be you should attack the magazine that created the list instead of the entrepreneurs? Better yet, create your anti-list of guys you think should be there but never will be because they are too busy doing too many important stuff. Simply cherry picking flaws in a b…

Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible. I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America tod…

Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things.

[Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.]

And that is great. Maybe there's something intelligent to say about how we need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors, or what the difference is, or why hardly anybody knows two of those three inventors.

Instead he went for the easy article and decided to piss all over everyone. Gratifying, to be sure, and there's going to be a coterie of people saying, "Yes, right on. Here are other ways in which all these people suck," but I think everyone is a little worse off for having an article like this written.

It was mean and no less venal than the entrepreneurs he is criticizing.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#35

Post by krschultz »

DirtyAndy wrote: post #10
ars wrote: post #5

entrepreneur == someone who makes money by running their own business entrepreneur != someone who invents something revolutionary The vast vast majority of the people in the world will never invent anything new. This is a list of people who found a less-than-common way of making money. This is NOT a list of people with revolutionary ideas.

Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars and trying to at least improve on th…

"Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur"

Absolutely. Only in the "startup" scene are people so conceited as to think otherwise. Those pesky people running "normal" businesses with their pesky "profits", they aren't ENTREPRENEURS! Entrepreneurs are only the people wasting other people's money chasing new ideas that probably won't work out!

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#36

Post by dasil003 »

DirtyAndy wrote: post #10
ars wrote: post #5

entrepreneur == someone who makes money by running their own business entrepreneur != someone who invents something revolutionary The vast vast majority of the people in the world will never invent anything new. This is a list of people who found a less-than-common way of making money. This is NOT a list of people with revolutionary ideas.

Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars and trying to at least improve on th…

I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way.

I have to disagree here. This is a VC/Angel-inspired echo-chamber mindset. I can certainly see a difference between growth businesses and small shops, but it's really a disservice to attempt to devalue the latter by yanking the word entrepreneur out from under it even though:

  * It took no less courage for those business owners to start
  * They may well have taken much more personal risk in the form of a small 
  business loan
  * Those businesses far outnumber the growth business, especially the successful
  growth businesses
  * Those businesses tend to provide things people really need and have solid 
  revenue whereas a lot of "growth" businesses are pursuing the founders 
  fetishistic ideas that turn out to have no value whatsoever
  * Almost any business can be grown and/or extended laterally.  It proves a lot
  more if you can take a business from 0 to $250,000 revenue by yourself than it
  does that you burned $5,000,000 to get a 1,000,000 users and you're still not
  cash flow positive because you can't figure out how to get anybody to pay for
  your brilliant "invention" which actually just consists of a semi-novel way of
  shuffling user data around.
Anyway, I don't disagree that the top entrepreneurs should be more impressive. But I just had to speak up against your devaluation of the the world's full entrepreneurial class. An entrepreneur is someone who starts a business, period.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#37

Post by paulgb »

edw519 wrote: post #24

He forgot a few: 1. A guy who threw daddy's money at the ridiculous idea that people would buy books without seeing or touching them first. 2. Two college nerds who thought people would use a TV screen instead of the yellow pages. 3. Two more college nerds who thought people would come to their web-site solely for the purpose of going to someone else's website. 4. Another college nerd who thought people could be frie…

re #6, that's actually a PR myth:

According to one myth, the site came into being because Mr Omidyar's fiancee, Pam Wesley, wanted to contact other people who shared her hobby of trading Pez sweet dispensers.

That story was a product of public relations - but it is true that the first item sold was Mr Omidyar's own broken laser pointer, which went for $14 despite being essentially worthless."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/business/4207510.stm

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#38

Post by zaidf »

jfarmer wrote: post #34
mechanical_fish wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible. I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America tod…

Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things. [Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.] And that is great. Ma…

need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors

You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically brights folks working on new things.

This ends up with the boring conclusion that may be we need both inventors + entrepreneurs. But just because it's boring doesn't mean it isn't accurate.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#40

Post by [deleted] »

edw519 wrote: post #24

He forgot a few: 1. A guy who threw daddy's money at the ridiculous idea that people would buy books without seeing or touching them first. 2. Two college nerds who thought people would use a TV screen instead of the yellow pages. 3. Two more college nerds who thought people would come to their web-site solely for the purpose of going to someone else's website. 4. Another college nerd who thought people could be frie…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN