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

Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

jpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 291 posts

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#161

Post by heavyset_go »

umvi wrote: post #77
abhiyerra wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I had to also wait till I paid off my student loans. There are a whole lot of shackles if you come from a humble background to starting a company full time. On the other hand it has never been cheaper to start a side hustle.

> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate. When you have infinite resources, you tend to waste it. Ever notice that when you have infinite t…

Rates of entrepreneurship are higher in Scandinavian countries than they are in the US.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#162

Post by cgh »

elliekelly wrote: post #22
fred_is_fred wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill's high school also had a PDP terminal connected to UW. Basically no other high school had that - which gave him an early head start.

This was mentioned in Outliers , I think. I wonder what the equivalent one-in-a-billion “head start” technology is for kids today.

Not exactly a technology, but parents who are mathematicians would be my guess. Developing a reasonably deep and intuitive understanding of statistics, probability and linear algebra at a young age would be a huge advantage, especially when coupled with eg R or Python.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#163

Post by La1n »

umvi wrote: post #77
abhiyerra wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I had to also wait till I paid off my student loans. There are a whole lot of shackles if you come from a humble background to starting a company full time. On the other hand it has never been cheaper to start a side hustle.

> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate. When you have infinite resources, you tend to waste it. Ever notice that when you have infinite t…

>Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate.

If this was true you'd see people from poor families being more entrepreneurial than those from rich.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#164

Post by anovikov »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4

I've known this for decades. When Bill Gates started publishing Smart Basic (or whatever) in magazines, I got a copy and saw what crap it was. I could do better. Why didn't I? That was my very first thought. The reason was, I had to work halftime to pay tuition and buy food. I was mired in working to live. Ol Bill had a family to support him as he bought resources (ads in magazines etc), recruited staff, took meeting…

Thing is, elites are hereditary. They always will be. If we enable entrepreneurship (or education) for that matter for the poor, other social mechanisms will appear that will make both of these irrelevant so that elites are preserved. Which in particular?

I'd rather not find it out.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#165

Post by jimbokun »

wegs wrote: post #27
jcadam wrote: post #8

All my attempts at entrepreneurship have been via moonlighting, and have failed. There just aren't enough hours in the day. But I can't just quit my day job and take my income down to $0 to pursue a startup.

My experience as well, until the first time I got funded. After a success under your belt, it's easy to keep going and get more funding. There's no shortage of capital looking for people to fund right now (it goes through spells). The first time I got funded, it was through a rich elite idiot's social connections (CEO). CEO was a sleazeball, and got all the financial and most of the branding benefit of the venture, d…

"1) Unskilled labor; to

2) Professional labor loaded with student loan/mortgage debt; to

3) Financial stability; to

4) Being able to launch high-risk high-reward ventures

That's possible, but it generally takes a few generations"

That sequence is coming up a lot lately in discussions of African Americans low wealth accumulation across generations, relative to whites.

In the sense that, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow, then through red-lining, and other forms of egregious discrimination, that multi-generational sequence of wealth accumulation has been artificially interrupted.

It's not clear what should be done to rectify that imbalance. (Reparations? Or is it enough to allow this sequence to play out unobstructed starting with current generation of African Americans, similarly to if they were a new immigrant family.)

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#166

Post by Geminidog »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4

I've known this for decades. When Bill Gates started publishing Smart Basic (or whatever) in magazines, I got a copy and saw what crap it was. I could do better. Why didn't I? That was my very first thought. The reason was, I had to work halftime to pay tuition and buy food. I was mired in working to live. Ol Bill had a family to support him as he bought resources (ads in magazines etc), recruited staff, took meeting…

I mean who didn't know this? It's quite obvious that if you're in debt or are poor you're not in a position to start a startup. Meanwhile if mommy and daddy are billionaires you can start up a business and fail with no worries.

Look at the extremes and the outcomes of the extremes. If the outcomes are opposite then it's quite likely that a gradient exists in between.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#167

Post by chaganated »

jcadam wrote: post #8

All my attempts at entrepreneurship have been via moonlighting, and have failed. There just aren't enough hours in the day. But I can't just quit my day job and take my income down to $0 to pursue a startup.

There was a guy who owned a recording studio. His observation was that artists who had menial jobs eventually made it. The ones with professional jobs all struck out. Brain energies may be in shorter supply than hours.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#168

Post by remirk »

snarf21 wrote: post #158
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4

I've known this for decades. When Bill Gates started publishing Smart Basic (or whatever) in magazines, I got a copy and saw what crap it was. I could do better. Why didn't I? That was my very first thought. The reason was, I had to work halftime to pay tuition and buy food. I was mired in working to live. Ol Bill had a family to support him as he bought resources (ads in magazines etc), recruited staff, took meeting…

This is all very true but UBI isn't the solution. The middle class can win this game with a perspective change. Instead of saddling their kids with school loans and pressuring them to "get a job" right out of school, they should give them 5 years where they "angel" them in their own houses for a stake in the company. Get four young sharp kids a couple of years with no bills to pay and I bet they could create somethin…

This works with the assumption that parents have enough disposible income to fully maintain their children well into their 20's. Which isn't always the case.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#169

Post by CM30 »

iso1631 wrote: post #88
CalRobert wrote: post #49

One thing that confuses me, though - if having a strong safety net to fall back on is important to enable entrepreneurship, why does it seem like Europe is so bad at it?

Europeans may be more risk averse too -- perhaps more YOLOs in America because there's nothing to lose, where as in Europe you can still have a normalish life, but it's not just a strong safety net either though -- many unicorn concepts were done in Europe, but they didn't become big globally. Maybe the lack of VC to scale - a lot of money sloshing around in SF. Maybe there's less of an culture of thinking "my way is…

I think the VC one is the main factor here, as is how risk adverse many investors seem to be in Europe. Put simply, the majority of them don't like investing in B2C companies, they don't like investing much money in general (by US standards) and they certainly don't like investing in businesses where it'll take years for it to pay off if they're lucky.

This means that if you ask for investment in something like Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/YouTube/Reddit/whatever you're almost certain to be turned down by European investors, because they're seen as too risky compared to say, a shop saying office software to ad agencies. But these high risk businesses are also ones with a high pay off if they do well.

There's also the fact European investors seem to have a relatively 'stingy' standard when it comes to how much money is worth investing in a startup. While over there in the US it seems like unproven companies are getting tens of millions of dollars on a whim, over here it seems like £50-100K is seen as a 'reasonable' investment amount, with some offering even less than that.

That money is not gonna be enough to hire Google level software engineers, have all the fancy buildings and facilities that many young folks expect, pay for high end hosting platforms, pay for a massive marketing/ad campaign, etc.

So even if you did get funding, you'd likely be outcompeted by US based companies flush with cash and resources that have years of runway compared to your 6 months or so worth.

Post reply on HN