If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else • Hacker News Board

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#31

Post by Xodarap » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 4:50 PM UTC

gdonelli wrote: post #18

According to the author: - 18% success rate for time founders - 20% success rate after that Implying previous experience almost doesn't matter that much... so just trying 5 times should assure 1 success. In that view, starting your company as soon as you can would still be the best way to get to your first success faster.

I think this is in interesting point (modulo the remark made elsewhere about "assuring" success), but I don't have the evidence to know how it should affect your decisions.

The research I cited found that first time and failed entrepreneurs have a 20% chance of success, whereas "skilled" entrepreneurs have a 30% chance of success. So if you can become "skilled" in one stint of employment, then you would expect to succeed sooner by being employed first than if you were doing startups that whole time.

But it's entirely possible that it takes multiple stints of direct employment to obtain whatever knowledge makes you skilled, in which case your argument is valid. I just don't know of any evidence about this though.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#32

Post by saddino » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

The path I took (founded four startups previously, two exits, currently working on fifth) was to first have a go at consulting.

Working for yourself is not much different from running a startup. You have a product (yourself). You have sales (winning contracts). You have accounting (for your invoices and for your expenses) and have to keep books. You have legal (your contracts). It's a great way to learn how to run a (hopefully) profitable business and build the foundation you'll need to run a startup.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#33

Post by mparr4 » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 4:57 PM UTC

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #30

Analysis like this is interesting because it assesses entrepreneurship like a career choice. Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. They aren't sitting on HN dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur(not that there is anything wrong with that). You see an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, believe you have the solution and can smell the money. The thought, "is this a good long-term career choice?" isn't in the equatio…

>The thought, "is this a good long-term career choice?" isn't in the equation. That's for people looking to build a career. This is your one great idea that will make you rich, fuck a career.

So building a career and being an entrepreneur are incompatible? I completely disagree with that idea. Not every entrepreneur is going for the big dollar exit.

I for one would be perfectly happy building my own company and never taking a dime of funding. Who wants to exit when you're doing what you love?

Fuck a career? No thanks, I like what I do and hope I can do it for a long time.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#34

Post by neltnerb » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #30

Analysis like this is interesting because it assesses entrepreneurship like a career choice. Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. They aren't sitting on HN dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur(not that there is anything wrong with that). You see an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, believe you have the solution and can smell the money. The thought, "is this a good long-term career choice?" isn't in the equatio…

I don't think I agree with this as stated.

In my observation, entrepreneurship is absolutely a career path, and most people who start a company keep starting them, move between working at them and creating them, or else get involved at an advisor/investor level if they've already had success.

I definitely think of my startup as a career path, and while I might get rich doing it, it's certainly in my mind that the technical challenges might just be insurmountable.

It might just fail through no fault of my own (a problem with hard science startups), and I am 100% confident that the skills I've picked up in doing this will make it easier to get the kind of job I would want next -- working at a much higher than entry level at either a small company or a new startup. Having that "CEO" and prior experience managing complicated projects on my resume absolutely puts me in a different class in looking for new jobs if it comes to that. I would have been hard pressed to come by that kind of experience at Intel or another big company, even though at one of those places I would have gotten tons of great experience in doing tech development.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#35

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 5:03 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #8

Tloewald wrote: post #2

Very informative and amusing post. My favorite statistic was the 18% of entrepreneurs succeed the first time, and only 20% succeed the second time. > The sort of person who jumps in and gives advice to the masses without doing a lot of research first generally believes that you should jump in and do things without doing a lot of research first. Like most good polemics, this one probably overstates the case. It seems…

>My favorite statistic was the 18% of entrepreneurs succeed the first time, and only 20% succeed the second time. This is a potentially misleading stat. The second cohort only includes the failures. So clearly at least some of them learned something. It's a 36% total success rate for entrepreneurs who try twice. (Though I guess that number is missing those that try once and don't try again)

Or it could just as easily mean that 18% succeed the first time, and the second time (after either an exit or a failure) only 2% more succeed

Which you could take to mean "If I don't succeed in my first venture, I am not part of the 18%- so am I part of the +2%?"

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#36

Post by michaelochurch » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

These venture-funded startups make a mockery of the concept. After all, if you're a true entrepreneur, are you really going to waste 6 months of your life asking a fucking venture capitalist for permission to be a founder? The VC-funded game is just the same private-sector social climbing that a previous generation called "the corporate ladder".

The real problem, the 9500-pound chain-smoking and belching elephant in the room, is that almost no one can bootstrap because the U.S. middle class is nearly gone and almost no one has any fucking money. In the 1960s, with strong unions and low housing costs and cheap health insurance that covered everything, worker bees actually could save up and have starting capital. The Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition) that is now killing the middle class wasn't even on the horizon, so people of average means had a real shot at starting their own ventures-- without having to get permission from a bunch of effete Sand Hill Road bureaucrats.

Add to this the obscene cost of living in Silicon Valley. Even the people with supposedly well-paid corporate jobs can't afford to buy houses. The only real way to make money in the Valley: be a landlord. Whenever entrepreneurship revives on the North American continent, it will be far from the tapped-out, overpriced, landlord's paradise wasteland of California.

Ok, so on to the finding itself... I agree. Most people who launch successful businesses had to learn on someone else's dime and risk before they had the capital, skills, and domain knowledge necessary to go on their own. It's pretty rare that a 22-year-old, fresh out of college, has (a) the leadership skill to create a business from scratch, and (b) insight into a real-world problem that can actually be made into a business. These VC darlings aren't true entrepreneurs and shouldn't be taken as typical; instead, they're rich kids whose parents are laundering family connections so it looks like their underachieving spawn are "startup wunderkinds" instead of well-placed halfwits that Wall Street didn't want.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#37

Post by Xodarap » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 5:10 PM UTC

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #30

Analysis like this is interesting because it assesses entrepreneurship like a career choice. Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. They aren't sitting on HN dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur(not that there is anything wrong with that). You see an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, believe you have the solution and can smell the money. The thought, "is this a good long-term career choice?" isn't in the equatio…

> Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea.

And how did you get that idea? How did you get the experience to see that there was an unfilled need in the marketplace?

People who have experience in a field perceive their risks as lower (correctly!) and are therefore more likely to start a company. It is a perfectly rational decision and is unrelated to risk tolerance.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#38

Post by Xodarap » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 5:13 PM UTC

kvee wrote: post #26

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #6

It kind of drives me nuts that I've read a lot of this research elsewhere, and all of my experiences have either flew in the face of them, or there were major asterisks. It makes me wonder, who were the people being studied, because I can see all of this being true in the general population, and you can even see it in most of the valley. There is something about the results that I don't trust, much like the way that…

I think it has something to do with the idea that 3% of YC applicants have a 100% chance of getting an interview. If you follow PG's ethos perfectly maybe you choose to work at a great startup that is going to succeed and then you start your own. Work at Justin.tv, and then start Twitch/ZeroCater

I would disagree with the causality. The sort of person who can get an influential job in a top-tier startup is probably also the sort of person who can start a good company.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#39

Post by rcarrigan87 » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 5:15 PM UTC

Xodarap wrote: post #37

rcarrigan87 wrote: post #30

Analysis like this is interesting because it assesses entrepreneurship like a career choice. Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. They aren't sitting on HN dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur(not that there is anything wrong with that). You see an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, believe you have the solution and can smell the money. The thought, "is this a good long-term career choice?" isn't in the equatio…

> Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. And how did you get that idea? How did you get the experience to see that there was an unfilled need in the marketplace? People who have experience in a field perceive their risks as lower (correctly!) and are therefore more likely to start a company. It is a perfectly rational decision and is unrelated to risk tolerance.

Exactly my point actually. You work in an industry, might even have a cozy corporate job and great benefits. You're on a solid career trajectory. Leaving that to start a company rarely makes financial sense. But most people aren't assessing it through that lens. They know their industry, have a great idea, and they HAVE TO DO IT. Even if financially it seems nuts!

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#40

Post by Xodarap » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 5:19 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #21

Out of curiosity, does anyone know how academic positions are counted in these numbers? Are the Google founders counted as having been previously employed in tech, for example? (They had paid PhD research positions at Stanford CS, but never worked in "regular" tech jobs in industry.)

Generally researchers identify industries by using a code system like [NAICS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Industry_Classif...). My guess is that the Google founders would not have been in a similar industry code, but I'm not familiar enough with Stanford to say for sure.