401–410 of 1001 posts
If you ever worked at FAANG or graduated from Ivy League, or have connected parents it's actually difficult to not get money from VCs - especially the last 2-3 years. Assuming that you have a reasonable sounding idea. Network and connections is highly undervalued. Once you have money, long term success becomes more likely also.
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> A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. This is not true! I have seen successful business built from scratch by people who had no connections, no money and no privileged background (and no VC money). And I will say this for sure, i…
Completely agree. Am on my 3rd company, all of them have reached profitability fairly easily. If you don't want to rely on luck, you have to work from the bottom. The VC, top down approach is very risky indeed, but a different game exists. Finding people who have problems that could be solved through better software is not hard. Listen to them. Make their life easier. Generalize, improve, start selling to other peopl…
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Bezos would not have kept Amazon in the US if it adopted Nordic welfare levels of taxation. The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.
Can confirm. Lived a very frugal early retirement lifestyle in Austria because it was practically impossible to build wealth (high taxes, comparatively very low tech salaries, little entrepreneurial support/incentives). Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifesty…
If you're lucky. The salaries in my country are so abysmal that nobody in my generation can buy a house: the only one with houses inherited them or have rich parents.
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> uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth What exactly do you mean here? because I'd argue depending on the product, each of the 3 could be the way to go over the others. Are you trying to say one is the best way of growing? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Disclaimer: solo bootstrapper, currently growing reasonably, but still way below 1M ARR. I did start with a pilot / first customer and then started doing cold outreach, while trying SEO/ads/social without much success for a few years. I tried combining both product-led and sales-led, and addressing a lot of different kinds of businesses, but this ended up making my go-to-market more complicated and resulted in almost…
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> (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!) I really don't understand this take. Why so many engineers feel entitled to have more than the average working Joe? If you are employed, our work is not risky, doesn't consume all your energy or your time, and so on. I fully understand the _economics_ behind our salaries, but I am more than happy to give 45%…
The average Joe in American can earn many times more than an engineer in the EU
The difference is not that US workers earn more on average, but that being an engineer doesn’t make you automatically rich in Europe like it does in tbe USA.
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Bezos would not have kept Amazon in the US if it adopted Nordic welfare levels of taxation. The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.
I looked up taxation in Norway, it looks very similar to ours. Personal marginal tax rates cap at 48% and corporate taxes are 23%. What am I missing? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Norway
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One of the privileges people don't often think about is being able to afford to fail. If you don't risk destitution after your startup fails, you can try and fail many times, learn and try again. It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die. One of the many reasons the rich get richer and the poor, well you know how it goes.
This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail. Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and pref…
Instead, the no risk route is to assimilate into the status quo, become a cog in The System's wheel. Providing foundational First World "human rights" would allow more professional / career freedom.
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This is ridiculous. If anything, California tends to be liberal - nothing to do with Socialism (let alone Communism). What does being a "woke" State (whatever that means) have to do with Socialism? California has very little in common with Nordic social-democracy. Even when looked at relatively to the rest of the US. And this is particularly true when one looks at the subject at hand, which is social safety nets. The…
You’re right it makes no sense but I think it’s undeniable California is used as an example of failed policies around social welfare and taxation by, say, Texas and Florida politicians.