61–70 of 70 posts
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That is the original meaning of the term middle class - a class that does not need to sell its labor to a boss to survive but who is also not part of the idle rich crowd.
In pre-revolution France, yes. But not in the United States.
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This path is also fraught with legal risk, depending on your "normal 9-5" employer. If it's a FAANG or other large tech company, most of them (at least the ones I've worked for) lay claim to every single IP you create while working there, on or off the clock, using your own equipment or theirs. It doesn't matter whether or not they legally can--you are unlikely to be able to afford a legal defense against them.
California has pretty friendly laws on this. Unless your startup is directly competing with your employer, or you work on it at work, they have very little ground to stand on. As in "within the realm of someone representing themselves"-type deal.
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The low cost base also means it’s really hard to compete against. A lot of VC money is aimed at monopolizing a niche and extracting long term above average returns out of it. Having a lifestyle company operating in their niche destroys that as a possibility and means they’ll never be able to get the returns they want.
Which is an interesting perspective if you're considering a lifestyle business. Can you build a small but meaningful competitor and draft off all the treasure some VC is plowing into r&d and marketing?
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IMO, the Marxist definition is a good one. Do you work for your money, or do you get most of your income through the leverage of your capital? Thus you end up with four categories: Those that cannot meet their needs, the poor, those that meet their needs exclusively through wages with no significant capital, the lower-middle class, those that need to work to make ends meet but can offset some of that through the leve…
Terminologically, both the middle and upper classes in the Marxist framework are bourgeois, the middle (mixed capital/labor dependent )being the petit bourgeoisie and the upper (pure capital dependent) being the haut bourgeoisie .
The guy who works a 9-5 but invests some of their paycheck in publicly traded stocks has a lot more class interest in common with all the other wage workers than they do with a small business owner.
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Terminologically, both the middle and upper classes in the Marxist framework are bourgeois, the middle (mixed capital/labor dependent )being the petit bourgeoisie and the upper (pure capital dependent) being the haut bourgeoisie .
While true, in Marx's time there wasn't nearly the level of mass involvement in capital investment as there is today. When Marx talks about the petite bourgeoisie, he's talking about shopkeepers who own their shops, farmers who own their farms, etc. The guy who works a 9-5 but invests some of their paycheck in publicly traded stocks has a lot more class interest in common with all the other wage workers than they do…
Sure, and they'd still be proletarians, even if, in many cases -- and this will often be characterized as "middle class" or even "upper middle class" depending largely on income in American discussions -- part of the proletarian intelligentsia. There's also a wider array, now -- though its still a small share of the population -- of patterns of economic participation that involve loosely balanced (in the sense that both are important, if not equal, contributors) labor (either wage-labor for another or labor applied to your own capital in one way or another) and capital dependence, and which are still petit bourgeois, and which is still the distinct middle class between the proletarian and the haut bourgeois, not the false middle-income workers "middle class" invented to divide the class dependent on wage-labor.
> I could have tried roughing it without venture funding, what the industry calls “bootstrapping.” The venture world has a condescending label for bootstrapped companies without scale potential: a “lifestyle” business, which roughly translates to: Good for you, now back to the sandbox until you’re ready to play with the big boys. Given my professed aim, this could have made sense. But there was so much funding for th…
There are too many artificial constrictions, forcing businesses to be hobbled to the slowest performer.
Ditch the labour requirement and half the world's economy can be automated from dawn to dusk.
Good conscience is wasted on business.
> I could have tried roughing it without venture funding, what the industry calls “bootstrapping.” The venture world has a condescending label for bootstrapped companies without scale potential: a “lifestyle” business, which roughly translates to: Good for you, now back to the sandbox until you’re ready to play with the big boys. Given my professed aim, this could have made sense. But there was so much funding for th…
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Also it's a false dichotomy mainly pushed on you by venture funds to encourage you to play in their world. Bootstrapped tech startups have such low costs and labor as to make other traditional small-business owners jaws hang on the floor in envy. Unicorn money is a distraction that's keeping everyone's eye off the ball and deluding people into ignoring the power in their fingertips.
The low cost base also means it’s really hard to compete against. A lot of VC money is aimed at monopolizing a niche and extracting long term above average returns out of it. Having a lifestyle company operating in their niche destroys that as a possibility and means they’ll never be able to get the returns they want.
Can you give an example of how that destroys what they're doing?