I remember a slew of articles mid 2015 that raised the criticism that founders came from privileged backgrounds. The article also mentioned "the cult of the entrepreneur" and the idolization of these characters.
I am born and raised in SV and yet I frankly do not understand the fetishization of entrepreneurs and the idea that this line of work is somehow holier than any other. Isn't that the root of the problem, rather than the privilege of the founders? After all, Wall Street is littered with nepotism and privileged family backgrounds, yet that isn't seen as much of an issue but rather just business as usual.
(perhaps the industry attempts to gain good will for its own gain through this portrayal, and this is the price they pay for this deceit though)
There's a narrative we're told about entrepreneurs that we're not told about Wall St. One of the founding values of America is that anyone with innovative entrepreneurial drive can start their own business and build wealth from nothing. It's what brought so many immigrants to this country, and is even taught to us in school as being the backbone of capitalism.
Most people in America have never actually met a successful entrepreneur. The shop keep down the street is usually under water with loans, and the big successes are corporations headquartered far away, the founders living in expensive seclusion. Heck, in my case it wasn't until I arrived in the Bay Area in my early 20's before I actually met someone who ran a successful business in person.
The successful entrepreneur is this key person in our social mythology, and stays very much a myth to most people. Their success gets spun into compelling stories that give a lot of hope to those who want a way out of poor circumstances. And in an effort to spin stories that sell, journalists (and PR people) often omit key facts, to match the "Self-Made Man" narrative that the people want to hear.
So, learning that yes it indeed is mostly myth and that no, not everyone can get a shot at being "Self-Made" - is pulling the curtains back on a long standing cultural deceit. The truth that success is mostly limited to a tiny subset of the population based on mixed factors like wealth, education, location, social values, generational cohort, parental upbringing etc, is a bitter pill to swallow.
Eager, but disadvantaged, entrepreneurs have been entering the tech market with this key information being withheld, aiming their sights on holding out for mega VC rounds when they should have been focused on earning a living. This leads to painful failures that could have been prevented. Had these founders been given the right narrative to begin with, they might have been better aligned to scale of business success that's reasonably within their grasp. That's the issue here
Yes, I mostly agree with your point. I have been reading a lot of biographies of successful entrepreneurs lately and have discovered that quite a lot of spinning and outright fabrication occurs in how their backgrounds are presented.
Like right now I am reading Elon Musk's biography. It's said he had a "tough" upbringing. Yet he had access to a "Commodore VIC-20" in apartheid-era South Africa and further was able to easily immigrate to Canada and later America in search of further opportunities because he was a Canadian citizen via his mother.
Elon Musk's dad was an engineer, and his mother was a model. Even if assuming he wasn't crazy wealthy, he was at least partially exposed to engineering, and brushed with educated people from an early age.
Not to mention, from Wikipedia "In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company, with US$28,000 of their father's (Errol Musk) money."
I adjusted for inflation, that was $44k in today's dollars - quite a substantial amount of money to be gifted from a parent. Plus in 1995 the very idea that the web not only existed but had investment potential was still limited to tech geeks.
So at a time when I literally spent 2 full years furiously arguing to my own dad about why he should simply allow me to hook up my modem using the household phone line, somewhere else in the world is Elon Musk - smart, exceedingly well educated, born in a year with a small generational cohort, along with his also ambitious brother - cashing a generous $28k check from his engineer dad to build, at the exact perfect time in history, a website business in a space that has been duplicated literally thousands of times since, and later sells it for $307 Million. How many people even have the opportunity to nail a combo like that?
Having access to a "Commodore VIC-29" or other accoutrements of wealth doesn't prevent one from having a rough upbringing. From the biography details, it seemed Elon Musk had to deal with with psychologically skewed family members in addition to making way in a backwards society bent on apartheid and violence. That can break a man. These resonate with me precisely because I've had to endure similar things. Not every part of the US is a safe haven. I'm blessed to have gotten where I am, but it's not without scares and I'm sure Musk has his as well. Some parts of myth making actually brings out more of the truth in a story.
Not just that, but he also attended Queens University, one of the best public universities in Canada at a total cost of almost zero due to his ctizenship. I believe he completed his undergrad studies at Amherst College, however.
The "Horatio Alger" myth is one of our most common to illustrate this one. Which is hilarious, because the myth is based on a heavily abridged version of the stories:
"We think we know what comes next: Through hard work and perseverance, Ragged Dick emerges from destitution into a well-deserved fortune. But our contemporary notion of a “Horatio Alger story” departs significantly from what actually transpires in a Horatio Alger story. His heroes do exhibit many of the traditional self-made virtues—industry, frugality, a penchant for self-improvement—which set him apart from the ne’er-do-wells and confidence men who populate his adventures in the streets of New York. But these attributes merely qualify the Alger hero for success; they don’t produce it.
Instead, in Ragged Dick and in the scores of imitations Alger would write in its wake, the hero’s rise is the result of good luck and the good offices of a wealthy benefactor. In novel after novel, Alger’s hero meets a kindly gentleman who takes an interest in the poor boy’s advancement. He then buys the boy a new suit—a rite of passage into respectability that occurs in every story (often there’s a new watch, too)—and finds him a job, typically a junior position in a mercantile firm. Ragged Dick retires his boot-blacking kit when he’s offered a position as a clerk in the counting room of a Mr. Rockwell. He earns that position by saving Rockwell’s son, who conveniently falls off the Brooklyn ferry just as Dick’s penmanship has really started to improve."
*Anyone with access to capital a financial cushion to land on when their business fails, I.e, is paid more than subsistence wage, and can play the social game with investors, and can actually get a meeting with investors.
I am born and raised in SV and yet I frankly do not understand the fetishization of entrepreneurs and the idea that this line of work is somehow holier than any other. Isn't that the root of the problem, rather than the privilege of the founders? After all, Wall Street is littered with nepotism and privileged family backgrounds, yet that isn't seen as much of an issue but rather just business as usual.
(perhaps the industry attempts to gain good will for its own gain through this portrayal, and this is the price they pay for this deceit though)