Myths about entrepreneurs • Hacker News Board

Re: Myths about entrepreneurs

#31

Post by ristretto » Mon, Aug 01, 2011, 11:51 AM UTC

niknir wrote: post #30

Another major flaw in the presentation of this data has to do with the base rate fallacy. For example, "founders of tech companies tend to be highly educated." Observing that the majority of successful founders have college degrees tells you nothing about the effect of not having a college degree. If 1% of students drop out, 99% do not drop out, and of the founders from the 1%, 80% are successful and from the 99%, 20…

The "dropout" meme is interesting, because, even though it implies that the subjects did not finish college / postgrad / phd , they did enroll in it and in many cases found inspiration / colleages / ideas while doing it. This seems to be more common than people choosing not to go to college at all.

P.s. are there anti-education agendas; i would be curious to read about it

Re: Myths about entrepreneurs

#32

Post by temphn » Mon, Aug 01, 2011, 12:54 PM UTC

ristretto wrote: post #31

niknir wrote: post #30

Another major flaw in the presentation of this data has to do with the base rate fallacy. For example, "founders of tech companies tend to be highly educated." Observing that the majority of successful founders have college degrees tells you nothing about the effect of not having a college degree. If 1% of students drop out, 99% do not drop out, and of the founders from the 1%, 80% are successful and from the 99%, 20…

The "dropout" meme is interesting, because, even though it implies that the subjects did not finish college / postgrad / phd , they did enroll in it and in many cases found inspiration / colleages / ideas while doing it. This seems to be more common than people choosing not to go to college at all. P.s. are there anti-education agendas; i would be curious to read about it

20under20 is a fairly well thought out "anti education agenda". It's not against the idea of learning, just the outdated concept of going $300k into debt for content you could have learned by yourself online. Predictably, Wadhwa is very much against the idea of doing anything that doesn't involve paying him and his colleagues for four years.

Re: Myths about entrepreneurs

#33

Post by jpdoctor » Mon, Aug 01, 2011, 2:31 PM UTC

nhebb wrote: post #28

ramanujan wrote: post #24

Unfortunately, Vivek Wadhwa is being highly misleading here. He publishes a variant of this same article over and over and over again in every forum available to him (see his old TechCrunch posts, for example). The key is really the misleading definitions at the beginning. He includes what we'd call lifestyle businesses as startups. Is a new carpet cleaner a startup? Publish the raw data, Vivek, with the actual names…

I want to agree with you because I find Vivek's writings repetitive, highly subjective, and often misleading. But to be fair, without seeing the study I can't be sure whether he's talking about startups or entrepreneurs in general. The title of the article is Five myths about entrepreneurs , but the content seems geared toward the tech sector. Unfortunately, the excerpt doesn't say which 12 "high-growth" sectors the…

> but other than a rare sexist I don't hear anyone saying that.

The thing about rare sexists is that they are not all that rare.