Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am done. I give up

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 1001 posts

Re: I am done. I give up

#641

Post by wereallterrrist »

jacquesm wrote: post #24

It's not defeat, it is the expected outcome. Out of 20 or so of my projects two have been break-out successes and the rest (commercially) complete failures, and I'm very lucky to have two out of those 20, with very small variations in timing it would have been a big fat zero. So don't beat yourself up about it, some people win the lottery and the majority don't. There is absolutely no recipe that will work every time…

Yeah, some of this just feels like advice some folks are going to have to learn first-hand, the hard, raw way. "Don't fall for parasocial bs touted on social media" is the new "make backups, seriously!111".

Re: I am done. I give up

#642

Post by starkd »

JohnBooty wrote: post #612
hcks wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, and this explains largely why most of the massively successful startups we all know comes from the Nordics and not from places with poor social security like the USA

Sarcasm noted. Seriously, though, this is somewhat easy to explain. Much of America does have an amazing "safety net": generational wealth. There's a reason why startups tend to spring from elite schools like Stanford, MIT, Yale, etc. Those kids have the brains, yes, but also the family connections and the parental safety nets and the connections to capital investment. These kids don't have to worry about food securi…

But its not just an economic safety net that is required. (Although that's part of it). It's also the network of social connections, family connections and upbringing. A stable childhood and family life, I would argue, is probably even more important. In a lot of ways, welfare support (at least how its been done in USA) has driven a wedge into the stability of the family (by decreasing marriage incentives, removing the father from the home, removing incentives, etc.) Not everybody is born with the same ambitions as those that attend MIT.

Re: I am done. I give up

#643

Post by jnovek »

safety1st wrote: post #516
jnovek wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Class mobility is generally regarded as a good thing for economies. It increases competition. What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations. If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economical…

You missed the point entirely.

Did you intend satire? Unfortunately, your post could’ve come straight from the mouth of more than one person I’ve met over the last few years.

Re: I am done. I give up

#644

Post by c16 »

Irrespective of what you think of Levels, he's shown me that it's a case of keep trying. He has 215k followers, has tried 70 different things, and only done well with 4 of them [1].

I'm in the same boat - I've tried many things, and most have failed. I currently have a side project with 1k users making no money, and I'm going to try monetise it - but I expect it to most likely fail. And I'm okay with it.

There's joy in being creative, making, growing, marketing, trying, learning. I can't remember where I read it, but once a founder makes their money, they often get lost in life. The common advice is then: "now do it again but this time enjoy the journey".

> They make it seem like building a successful startup is easy [...] [but] It's fucking hard and it takes more than just a positive attitude to make it.

Welcome to startups! Another great quote I read was "Bam! Overnight success story! It only took 7.5 years" [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 [2] https://siliconvict.com/articles/5-lessons-starting-a-500m-a...

Re: I am done. I give up

#645

Post by bumby »

ip26 wrote: post #640
bumby wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. What if they’re currently living in Bangladesh?

In this model, people living in Bangladesh skip the “moving” part. They already live in a low cost locale.

So they have open doors to be wildly successful entrepreneurs?

My point is that the OPs “model” is a strategy for a limited population and not very generalizable. Within those caveats, I have no issue with their suggestion.

Re: I am done. I give up

#646

Post by czbond »

Lutger wrote: post #256
ETH_start wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intuition is that effective entrepreneurs generally have a strong conviction that they won't fail, and in any case wouldn't want to fall back on taxpayers if they did. They will also disproportionately be averse to paying social democratic tax rates once they, in their mind, inevitably succeed.

This doesn't strike me as something inherently part of entrepreneurship in a world-wide context, but rather something particular to anglo saxon countries, and especially Americans which are big on neoliberal ideology. Americans are also the most anti-government of any people I know. The Netherlands is split in this I think, but the entrepreneurs I know are nothing like this. They appreciate the safety net and often h…

My view, from the U.S., is that most founders want to make it on their own and keep the returns close to the vest (aka "low taxes).

The risks are too high to found a company for little payoff.... and most founders that exit already pay a significant tax on exits (even when they are structured to reduce tax). Entrepreneurship is too hard of a game to put up with the mental and work grinding for a decade for small returns. Everyone focuses on the "money" a founder may make (with heavy survivorship bias) - but don't focus on the high probability of losing years, or a decade, of lost revenue and social life if a company fails.

HN is filled with want-trapreneurs who are mis-guided about the game they're entering.

Re: I am done. I give up

#647

Post by didip »

pavlov wrote: post #200
kubb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with Nordic model is that they are too successful in taking care of the people.

Very few are “hungry” and “hunger” is an important ingredient to startups

Re: I am done. I give up

#648

Post by Retric »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #631
Retric wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US total government spending is officially 34% of total GDP, Germany is 43.7%. With much of that covering healthcare and collage education which more than makes up the difference for the median family. In the end, the US’s extreme defense spending and horrifically inefficient healthcare system is a massive drag on the economy. What the US does differently from most of the EU is to hide as much spending as possible in…

US military spending is 4% of GDP. When a warmonger is president, that goes up to about 6% of GDP. The NATO commitment is 2% of GDP. It is not particularly extreme. The real drag is the US healthcare system, which effectively finances most of the medical R&D for the US, India, South America, and Europe, and also provides ridiculous levels of treatment for people who are about to die (in comparison to other health sys…

Officially it’s $1.64 Trillion in 2022 on defense vs ~23.4 Trillion GDP or 7% GDP. https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... You can see different numbers based on if you include stuff like the DoE spending on nuclear weapon ‘stewardship’ or only parts of the coast guard, national guard, VA etc.

US healthcare spending hardly subsidizes the rest of the world. Paperwork and insurance overhead don’t magically turn into R&D money. Litigation, malpractice insurance, excessive testing etc is just waste.

At best ~12% of US healthcare spending is for retail drugs, but it’s not that relevant globally when you consider how much US companies are spending on advertising vs R&D. Which is then compounded by how much more expensive US drug trials are.

Re: I am done. I give up

#649

Post by moneywoes »

kypro wrote: post #125

Indie hackers had a great post a couple of years ago looking at how many projects posted there were actually successfully. I don't remember the details now, but I remember it being a depressingly small number that made me realise how statistically stupid it was to attempt to create a tech startup. I think the conclusion was that you probably had something like a low single digit percentage chance of building somethin…

> If you really want to start a company at least leverage the high income you make as a tech worker to start something with some barrier to entry. It might not make you a multimillionaire, but I've seen way more people successfully go from a tech job into opening a restaurant or into real estate.

Can you expand on this? Like commercial property? Restaurants are notoriously unprofitable

Re: I am done. I give up

#650

Post by starkd »

api wrote: post #511
hcks wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, and this explains largely why most of the massively successful startups we all know comes from the Nordics and not from places with poor social security like the USA

I think it’s cultural. The US places a lot of value on striving out and doing new things. It’s a frontier culture. Older cultures tend to be more conservative. You can see this effect inside the US. The most “business friendly” states often do not lead in entrepreneurship because they’re culturally more conservative.

I disagree. Texas has been one of the fastest growing economies in the states. With a lot of technology companies.
Post reply on HN