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Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

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

#21

Post by epistasis »

SilasX wrote: post #19
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…

Or all the UBI money would pump up rents to the point that living costs make it infeasible again.

Rents only get pumped up if we don't have enough housing to go around... in which case regular incomes do the same thing.

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

#22

Post by elliekelly »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #12
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…

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.

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

#23

Post by tenebrisalietum »

SilasX wrote: post #19
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…

Or all the UBI money would pump up rents to the point that living costs make it infeasible again.

UBI needs to be paired with restricting rent increases or eliminating zoning restrictions that limit housing supply then.

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

#25

Post by diogenescynic »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #12
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…

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.

And Bill's mom provided the connection to IBM. That's a huge advantage.

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

#26

Post by the-smug-one »

ksec wrote: post #24

I still remember the tweet [1] PG strongly disagree with that and arguing with Matthew Prince. [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657?s=20

PG should remind himself that statistical outliers exist.

A short quip on Twitter does not mean anything when you have quantitative data against you.

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

#27

Post by wegs »

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, despite doing no work. I launched a successful business with CEO as the figurehead, and in the process, I got:

1) Connections and network

2) Visibility and branding

3) Stepping through the process once. Moonlighting can be enough time if you're efficient (which you can't be if you're muddling through figuring stuff out)

It was a stepping stone towards financial stability, and I'm much closer. Socioeconomic mobility is a process. Some people get lucky, of course, but for the most part, there's a pathway from:

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:

* It's possible for someone without an education to send kids off to college through public schools, but they'll have a hard time competing with kids who were exposed to advanced tutoring, math, STEM, makerspaces, etc. from an early age (children of professionals)

* It's possible for first-generation professionals to network into power networks and achieve financial stability, but they won't be in a place to quit a job and launch a new venture.

* And it's possible for children of professionals to then (finally) engage in a few high-risk high-reward projects until one pays off....

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

#28

Post by adenozine »

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.

Call me crazy, but I think if there's any HS classes or earlier, teaching algorithmic thinking, those kids are have a crazy head start if they choose CS.

I don't mean these classes where they get out and write

    class Dog(Animal):
      def bark(self):
        print("a Dog is barking!")
but if there's young people being taught the difference between quadratic/exponential/polynomial algorithms, that's going to stew in their brains and ferment into gray matter that will ACTUALLY make them better programmers.

I'm not an educator, nor am I educated ABOUT education, but it's just my hunch. I've seen many a young buck come around with a fancy degree or whatever, and not be able to see a skip-list shaped hole for his skip-list shaped peg. That's hard to deal with at a meta scale. I can't develop a way to quickly train people OTJ how to think algorithmically. They either learned to think about the problems that way, or they learned to rely on some stupid Haskell/Python/Elixir/Kotlin/Blub thing, and can't get any meaningful work done quickly.

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

#29

Post by thisisnico »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #23
SilasX wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or all the UBI money would pump up rents to the point that living costs make it infeasible again.

UBI needs to be paired with restricting rent increases or eliminating zoning restrictions that limit housing supply then.

As a landlord, and landlording in an area with restricted rent, it makes zero difference. It's only good if you stay where you rent, but if you move, it's market rent. You can't adequately control market rent because there are so so many variable on what market rent is for every individual unit, location, type, etc. I'm all for the eliminating zoning restrictions though.

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

#30

Post by staunch »

ksec wrote: post #24

I still remember the tweet [1] PG strongly disagree with that and arguing with Matthew Prince. [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657?s=20

> The next time someone claims that starting startups is for rich kids, remind them that Airbnb happened because its founders literally could not pay their rent.

Starting startups is not just for rich kids. But it is dominated by rich kids to an extreme that Paul Graham is completely blind to, living in the bubble he has his whole life.

Depending on your definition of rich, of course. Most of the benefit is being in the upper class, that's what "rich" means to people living in the lower classes. To upper class people, being "rich" means having a private jet.

Almost every major tech founder fits the profile of having had the benefit of SAT prep and tutors to game entry into an "elite" school and parents able to provide free food/shelter/funding. Many parents have connections to draw upon.

Steve Jobs is one of the very few exceptions. And, to my mind, it's not a surprise that he's the best tech founder that ever will be.

Airbnb founder Nathan Blecharczyk was definitely a rich kid.

"He grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Boston Latin Academy."

"He was also on the business staff of The Harvard Crimson during his time at Harvard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Blecharczyk

The others maybe not. It's hard to know how much money a family has. But they moved to SF and rented an expensive apartment with no jobs. This isn't something most poor kids do. Who co-signed their lease, given that they had no income? Likely it was a parent ready to bail them out if they ran out of credit cards.

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