An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool • Hacker News Board

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#21

Post by DanielBMarkham » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 4:23 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #20

As usual, the economist is looking for its keys under the lamppost. In their graph, "Ease of starting a business" is a measure of how long it takes to process incorporation and tax paperwork. That is not the hard part. The hard part is finding co-founders and investors willing to invest, and customers willing to buy from new companies. It's a function of optimism and risk taking, not on government procedures.

It's an additive function including optimism, risk-taking, and government procedures, not an either-or situation.

We focus on the latter part because as startup junkies we're interested in that. But there are lots of low risk businesses which do not require partners and such. Running a hot-dog stand at the park, starting a small-engine repair service, doing horse-grooming, running an ice-cream truck. Sure, these things require optimism and capital (to some small degree), but you can get ramen-profitable with a bubble-gum vending company without partners or investors or any of the other stuff we talk about for technology startups.

What you can't get away from, however, is dealing with government at all of its levels.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#22

Post by tlb » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 4:30 PM UTC

randomwalker wrote: post #3

Interesting article overall, but one clueless sentence amused me: "Meg Whitman grew rich by developing an online marketplace, eBay, where people could buy and sell without ever meeting." I recommend the book Paypal Wars . It was written by one of the "Paypal mafia." The book goes into quite a bit of detail about the early Paypal-eBay story, with an epilogue covering events until 2006. The reality is exactly the oppos…

It's unbelievably hard to unseat them. I knew the Yahoo Auctions team well back in 1998-2001, and they had a better product for free. Sellers and buyers preferred it. But there weren't many buyers because the sellers weren't there, and there weren't many sellers because the buyers weren't there. So even with Yahoo's network and brand they didn't win. (They did win big in Japan where eBay was slow to localize.)

Auctions have worse lock-in than you'd expect. You might think, if there's a marketplace with X buyers and another with X/10 buyers, most sellers would make the effort to list in the X/10 marketplace because they can increase their sales 10%. But with auctions, the sales price is a strong function of excess demand. Those extra 10% sales would be at significantly lower prices, and eBay merchandise tends to have low margins. When sellers lost money they quickly left.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#23

Post by run4yourlives » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 4:45 PM UTC

It's a horrible title really.

Entrepreneurialism has always been cool. Everyone has always envied Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Fred Smith's mythical paper is the stuff of business legend. Nothing has changed here.

But like the article correctly states, what's changed is that entrepreneurialism has been introduced to the middle class. It's been made so easy that all those future CEO's and ladder climbers are starting to realize there is another option. High quality talent sees another way of living life - and they like it.

Not touched on in the article is the fact that this change in viewpoint from "climb the corporate ladder to success" to "launch a business and iterate to success" could be as revolutionary as the printing press. Think about it - the appeal of being an entrepreneur attracts the same people that would find getting an MBA and working their way up to C level positions appealing. We could - in effect - be at the very early stages of an extended "brain drain" of talent leaving large corporations without the leadership they need to survive. As the company finds itself less and less attractive to high-end talent, they struggle to keep up. And the spiral continues.

What we actually may be witnessing is the very early stages of the death of the corporation as a viable entity - all due primarily to the birth of the internet. That type of changes is revolutionary - we're talking industrial revolution scales here.

We're living in amazingly exciting times. I would love to see what the history books say about us 250 years from now.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#24

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 5:56 PM UTC

miloshh wrote: post #16

An optimistic article, but I wonder if entrepreneurialism has become cool only in very limited circles - like here. Out in the real world, with the crisis and rising unemployment, it is once again becoming a sign of life success to land a safe job in a large corporation. It seems that getting hired by (say) Google is even more impressive now than a few years ago. Another thing that worries me is that there are no IPO…

[deleted]

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#25

Post by puzzle-out » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 6:05 PM UTC

Entrepreneurship has been cool for a while now - and is now a part of the establishment - all the major universities have jumped on the entrepreneurship bandwagon, and governments avidly promote their support for entrepreneurs. So becoming an entrepreneur can now be a socially validated choice. But is this a good thing? Historically, entrepreneurs have come from the disenfranchised - religious nonconformists, immigrant communities - people who are forced to find another way of making money because they could not get on using traditional social paths. They can change the world because they have always seen it partly from the forced perspective of an outsider.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#26

Post by coglethorpe » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 7:16 PM UTC

rjurney wrote: post #2

If startups are cool everywhere, is Atlanta still just as hosed as Munich?

Not sure what that means. I'm in Atlanta and noticing a startup community here. I've nothing to compare it to, but I do note at least two exits (JungleDisk and FireThorn) recently, so somebody's making bank.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#27

Post by rjurney » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 8:43 PM UTC

coglethorpe wrote: post #26

rjurney wrote: post #2

If startups are cool everywhere, is Atlanta still just as hosed as Munich?

Not sure what that means. I'm in Atlanta and noticing a startup community here. I've nothing to compare it to, but I do note at least two exits (JungleDisk and FireThorn) recently, so somebody's making bank.

I'm in Atlanta too, and there is definitely a startup community, but what I was referring to was this: http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html

"It's cities that compete, not countries. Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich."

Its another PG essay, and well worth a read.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#28

Post by zach » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 8:46 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #22

randomwalker wrote: post #3

Interesting article overall, but one clueless sentence amused me: "Meg Whitman grew rich by developing an online marketplace, eBay, where people could buy and sell without ever meeting." I recommend the book Paypal Wars . It was written by one of the "Paypal mafia." The book goes into quite a bit of detail about the early Paypal-eBay story, with an epilogue covering events until 2006. The reality is exactly the oppos…

It's unbelievably hard to unseat them. I knew the Yahoo Auctions team well back in 1998-2001, and they had a better product for free. Sellers and buyers preferred it. But there weren't many buyers because the sellers weren't there, and there weren't many sellers because the buyers weren't there. So even with Yahoo's network and brand they didn't win. (They did win big in Japan where eBay was slow to localize.) Auctio…

It's interesting that eBay does seem to be the first web auctioneer of any note. As many have pointed out, others sold books on the web before Amazon, there were many search sites before Google, etc. But eBay basically invented it and has held onto it.

It has been said that Columbus wasn't the first to discover America, but he became famous for being the last. After his legend spread, none could again make that claim credibly to the public.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#29

Post by davidw » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 9:49 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #20

As usual, the economist is looking for its keys under the lamppost. In their graph, "Ease of starting a business" is a measure of how long it takes to process incorporation and tax paperwork. That is not the hard part. The hard part is finding co-founders and investors willing to invest, and customers willing to buy from new companies. It's a function of optimism and risk taking, not on government procedures.

> how long it takes to process incorporation and tax paperwork. That is not the hard part.

Try it here in Italy and then say that. Sadly, that sort of thing does matter, when it really shouldn't. We all have different ideas about how much, if any, taxes people should pay, but it's really stupid to make people pay through the nose before they've even managed to start anything, let alone made any money at it.

Re: An idea whose time has come: Entrepreneurialism has become cool

#30

Post by potatolicious » Fri, Mar 13, 2009, 9:57 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #15

pixelmonkey wrote: post #7

I just (voluntarily) left a comfortable job at a behemoth corporation to start my own company with a friend from college. I thought I was being brave, but apparently I'm just succumbing to a fad? I don't think it's that starting a business is "cool"; I mean, I guess it is, in some sense, although paying for your own health care isn't very cool. For me, this quote was apt: "People’s attitudes to security and risk also…

That's what they mean about changing attitudes though... once upon a time, people got jobs with 'good companies' that made more than a token effort to take care of them even when things were a bit rough. There's value in that if you have a family and kids. Nowadays, though, you're right - the big companies will throw you to the wolves with no second thoughts, so what's the point? Also, big companies do have a lot of…

I'm 22 years old and you hit the nail on the head about why I want to go into business for myself eventually. When I was growing up I was constantly told that starting your own business was too risky, that a stable job with a big company is the most secure way to go.

And then for the last 10 years I've seen my father move from job to job, fear for his employment constantly, and right now is batting down the hatches because his PHB-dominated company is going through another round of restructuring because they can't build a product if their lives depended on it. Yay.

I look at this and wonder how secure a "real job" really is, and given how little security there is in a job these days, is there a good reason to take one?