I left a 6 figure engineering job to build my own startup with my wife. For the past 5 years, we spent 2/3rds of our savings on it and almost didn’t take vacation. This year we finally reached ramen profitability.
When I look at where we would be if I had kept the job, we would be homeowners, be able to buy new clothes regularly, go to restaurants and take awesome vacations a few times a year.
But the missing thing would be autonomy. The reason why I’m willing to sacrifice so much is because i fundamentally don’t like having to follow orders from a boss or manager. I’m arrogant enough to think i know better, and want to prove it by actually building my own thing.
Regardless of how silly it sounds on a financial level, the calculation makes sense once we look at the sense of ownership and autonomy over our own work. It’s worth more to me than any money I could make.
Hi, I just wanted to say congrats, your site and service looks very nice, proposition is clear, there is a spin which makes it different from other design agencies and I like the pricing tier setup, it makes sense (for me)! Made a bookmark for when this will come handy in the future.
I've been following you for quite some time now, and I really appreciate the honesty and the way you share both the ups and downs of running your own small business.
On the building side of things, the main challenge is designing all the logos, my wife designed more than 800 so far. (almost every other logo generator site use existing icon libraries)
It took a bit more than a year to have enough logos to launch, design the product and code the platform. In part because we were such perfectionists (which we aren't as much anymore).
But launching was only the beginning, and soon the real challenge presented itself: how to find customers. Had to figure out a distribution and marketing strategy which we had no experience with, all the while improving the product. And this is why it's now been 5 years.
We started by sponsoring newsletters and google ads. But it didn't convert and we didn't have the budget to keep experimenting.
Then I started being active on indiehackers.com and reddit to first ask for feedback, then eventually sharing my learnings and lesson in blog post format. This showed promise and got us to a couple sales per week as other founders got curious about us and then considered us when they needed a logo.
Eventually what really helped is twitter. I started tweeting in summer 2021 and talking about what I was going through, and noticed people cared and it led to more traffic to our site. So I decided to go all in and dedicated hours per day on it, trying to bring value and grow. After a few months we 10x revenue and it hasn't came down since (although it fluctuates).
The other thing from twitter is that I met so many people in the industry, this led to hundreds of SEO backlinks from people's blogs writing about us from interviews, podcasts, recommendation articles and so on. This was really the spark that made us go from invisible to visible.
Now this year the big push is to write high-quality blog posts about branding for startups. Hopefully to get some SEO traffic and grow sales even further.
This is really cool. I'm in the branding phase of an app on the side at the moment, and I absolutely loathe trying to pin down the name and the logo because it is dark alley after dark alley until you reach some okay-enough state to launch with.
This is exactly why we built this. Allows you to get a professional branding to start with even on low budget. Then you can go ahead and launch, validate your product, and come back to get custom work done when you need it / can budget for it.
It’s an interesting article. In my view, Non-conformists start companies. Possibly aggressive non-conformists most of all.
In my personal case, I made many questionable choices, including turning down a job at Microsoft in the nineties (would have been better financially) and leaving multiple great jobs (one of which afforded me corporate apartments in Honolulu and London) to risk everything multiple times to start multiple companies.
So there’s risk-seeking behavior there as well as a refusal to accept “good enough” even when it was almost definitely a better choice from a financial and physical health perspective.
I can still see my dad shaking his head about turning down Microsoft…
It sort of worked out. I had a good exit but nothing like kicking it at M$ for 30 years would have been.
I’m not sure we why we glamorize this. But in the end I wouldn’t change it. I did it my way. I’m now trying to do it again.
This is why I can’t play any games which require grinding (looking at you Eve) because I know it’s more fun IRL. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not especially non-conformists - non-conformity is merely a symptom.
As you say, risk seeking behavior, resulting from the actual cause: "poor risk assessment" - ties right in to difficult childhood, mental health issues, and the market misjudging you (all causes or signs of trauma and being outside the norm).
I say this as someone with an appetite for trying new things, being non-conformist, and adventure sports - clearly the accuracy or the precision of my risk assessment model is significantly outside the norm!
People with excellent and accurate risk estimation and assessment work as actuaries, or accountants, certain kinds of insurance brokers, something nice and safe where you can do good work for 35 years and retire. The quintessential "brown volvo" driver.
Now, I personally think those people are rather safe and uninteresting - but then we've already established I'm probably not the person to base your decisions on!
At age 6, I was tested for my tendency towards risk aversion. I scored as high as possible in risk aversion; in other words, I was extremely risk-averse, as my parents worried. That tendency marked a better part of my life, and it brought forth/was comorbid with GAD and generalized depression. All of those things make you think that if you just had more control you would feel better, but the grasping for it only exacerbates the symptoms.
Now I'm 41, and am really interested in bootstrapping (I have made one small app, working on the next). In particular, I love the risk/reward calculus especially. I've gradually awoken to the amount of value I bring via programming and strategy versus the salary structure in place at a lot of companies. This year I'm focusing on amassing leverage in several forms, be that a more public voice, a more fit body, additional income streams (however small), etc. (Typical midlife stuff, yes.)
In my experience, most successful entrepreneurs are usually quite good at accurately assessing risks. They are simply more capable and willing to embrace certain risks in pursuit of greater rewards in the future.
Optimism is basically the same as poor risk assessment. Risk assessment, aka spending time analyzing everything that could go wrong ahead of time. Show me an optimist who does that and I will show you a pessimist.
But the dominant trait at least for serial entrepreneurs might still be pessimism at the core, because it requires willingness to fail. You need to be pessimistic enough to expect to fail many times as a normal course of action until you luck out. If you don't expect to fail then the first large failure becomes the final blow.
This is the same kind of error people make when they assume an introvert must have poor social skills, even though that's often not the case.
There's a meme/comic that goes like this:
Panel 1, "Nothing really matters": a little creature in a void, sad. "What people think nihilism is."
Panel 2, "Nothing really matters": the same creature surrounded by rainbows and puppies, happy. "What nihilism really is."
In the same way that recognizing nothing really matters in our march toward entropy means we can get on with choosing our own path in life, recognizing the pitfalls of a potential path means we can walk it in confidence.
I know there be dragons, and I'm going to date them all.
In my experience people are inaccurately pessimistic, in part due to a lack of imagination. So risk assessment that's more accurate will present as more optimistic.
>As you say, risk seeking behavior, resulting from the actual cause: "poor risk assessment" -
You project value judgement into places where there need not be any. Most of these people who are doing "entrepreneurial things" come out somewhat ahead over their careers. It's not like they're dying destitute. Do they (in aggregate) come out as far ahead in terms of dollars as someone who grinds leet code and job hops between BigcCo? Probably not. But that's not what they're optimizing for.
> ties right in to difficult childhood, mental health issues, and the market misjudging you (all causes or signs of trauma and being outside the norm).
Ah, yes, the ol' anyone who doesn't agree with you must have something "wrong with them" or "be damaged" line of reasoning.
>I say this as someone with an appetite for trying new things, being non-conformist, and adventure sports -
Having a hobby that might put you in a cast isn't the kind of risk being discussed here. It's misleading (to be charitable) to portray that kind of risk exposure as analogous to doing things that will have large impact on your earning potential in the short, medium and long term.
>People with excellent and accurate risk estimation and assessment work as actuaries, or accountants, certain kinds of insurance brokers, something nice and safe where you can do good work for 35 years and retire. The quintessential "brown volvo" driver.
You are conflating loss avoidance with risk assessment.
And I say this as someone who is living the exact career you are trying to stereotype in a positive light.
>
People with excellent and accurate risk estimation and assessment work as actuaries, or accountants, certain kinds of insurance brokers, something nice and safe where you can do good work for 35 years and retire. The quintessential "brown volvo" driver.
To work as an actuary, it is better if you are rather on the risk-averse side (i.e. err into this direction instead of having a tendency for excellent and accurate risk estimation) because insurance companies and regulatory authorities are very biased into this direction.
> This is why I can’t play any games which require grinding (looking at you Eve) because I know it’s more fun IRL. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This realization almost permanently put me off most online video games. Most team-based games are made such that one individual can't swing the game too much, because that's seen as bad. Thus only about 20-30% of games you can directly impact, thus you're mainly just burning time with limited agency for player skill. MMORPGs are timesinks first and foremost, rather than skill-based games.
I replaced them (mostly) with music. Music has an infinite skill ceiling that is apparent, it is cooperative, creative, and tends to have people that want to be there, versus people who are there because they don't have anything better to do.
Have to throw a good mention of Dark Souls here. The vibes, the story, and the themes resonate deeply with me and connect naturally with the highs and lows of entrepreneurship.
Had to chime in here RE: music. When I encounter people that wish they could play guitar/piano/etc and say "they have no time", but then I find out they play games for hours per day. Well... priorities right?
(I hardly play games anymore)
"including turning down a job at Microsoft in the nineties
I can still see my dad shaking his head about turning down Microsoft…"
That was quite a while ago... Probably should forgive and forget that one. Forgiving the disappointment makes mental space for new opportunities.
I agree non-conformists start the really visible flashy companies. A new aircraft maintenance company can make bank, but it doesn't really grab headlines.
My experience: Psychological orphans with a basic income.
"Psychological orphans" i.e. kids who had shitty parents and learned to adapt to survive. Then this behavior became a habit and a game.
"Basic income" i.e. kids from middle and upper middle class backgrounds so there was no food poverty in the family and long term thinking was possible by the kid, even in the context of the dysfunctional setting.
The above is true for me and all of the high growth tech founders I know on a very personal level (could be selection bias in who I connect deeply with though).
My recipe for tech startup founder includes:
1. You were one of the smartest kids at your private school—so you’re opinionated and confident
2. You’re some kind of social misfit with a chip on your shoulder
3. Father is an Engineer, Lawyer, Banker, Doctor
4. Got some private tutoring or coaching at a young age
5. Went to a fancy big-name college
It doesn’t apply to everyone, but during a recent job search I did a little detective work on founders at jobs I was applying for, and this was the large majority of them
Wow, that's a really interesting observation and describes me perfectly. I wouldn't consider myself a "real" entrepreneur, but I've always had a side hustle and I own some rental properties.
I took me until the age of 34 and having kids of my own to realize that my childhood wasn't that great, and that a parent's role should extend beyond just feeding their kids. My upbringing made my hyper-independent, so the desire to make myself completely financially independent basically consumed by 20s. It took me a long time to realize this drive, while useful in my career, came from a very unhealthy place.
Yea, I definitely have seen this same pattern, nice description.
Though there is the "upper class" founder background that still had shitty parents and something to prove, and often they can get really far because of the $ and connections, though often have the issue that their alternative life is a bit "too easy" so they don't execute hard enough / close enough, or they just give up.
Another correlation, very unusual and interesting, is that past infection with Toxoplasmosis (a parasite that grows in cat poop) increases the chances of becoming an entrepreneur by a factor of 1.27 to 2
> they discovered that those infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii were, on average, 29% more likely than others to have founded a start-up, 27% more likely to have founded multiple ventures, and more than twice as likely to have founded their businesses alone
Along with an increased risk of death via car accidents, having contracted Toxoplasmosis seems to precipitate risk seeking behaviors, similar to its intended evolutionary prerogative: the infection makes rats sexually aroused by the smell of cat urine, so they seek the smell, where cats are more likely to be around, are eaten by cats, and the cycle continues.
I'm just guessing, but I think you'll find an even stronger correlations from Toxoplasmosis to the lack of traditional family obligations, and also the latter to entrepreneurship.
Working on my second startup. I have clinical depression, ADHD and OCD.
The depression is an endless battle through a muddy swamp. I have to endlessly game it with exercise, sleep, supplements. I would give anything to not be held back by that.
I somewhat envy the manic benefits of Bipolar! That sounds so much better than just regular depression! /h
But my ADHD is high functioning. My mind constantly jumps from topic to topic, every aspect of a problem, or any problem in my life, or anticipated future life. And my brain tracks all these puzzle pieces well. It is my counter-point to focusing!
And OCD works for me too. I think it is what makes my ADHD work for me. Always fixing, improving, smoothing, organizing. I can get distracted rearranging books on a shelf, but even then its like meditation, my zen, in that even small positive changes to my environment motivate me out of depression.
Also, the constant ADHD/OCD iterations over the smallest things, leads me to fluency with my projects that invariably lead to the bigger novel insights that make all the difference.
You can't run around the base of a huge mountain like a madman, testing every possible crevice, accumulating every possible strategy, practicing every kind of traversal, and acquiring every piece of equipment, without finding a way up! Even if I can't describe to anyone whether I am making any progress at all until I do!
The downside of ADHD is very real for me: "less skilled at necessary tasks like accounting and bookkeeping" is an understatement. I can keep my regular life on rails, or get work done. Unfortunately, not both.
I feel you. Depression and ADHD is what I credit for my 'independent work personality' a burnout was what made me quit the job I always wanted about 8 years ago. And 3 'companies' later my main pain in life is bookkeeping.
I am not risk seeking, but definitely a non conformist. I think the main thing that drove me to be entrepreneural is the lack of a choice, for not 99% properly working people, in the traditional working market.
"In pursuit of that subject, we’ve studied companies from around the world, across industries, and at different stages of maturation, hopping from Starbucks to Stripe, Y Combinator to Flexport, Rappi to Kaspi, and DST to TSMC."
A curious sample. Unfortunately these types of "studies" omit the bulk of entrepreneurs that keep an economy running. Small businesses, 5-50 employees, that tick on without the glory and fame that outliers capture are more interesting and more likely to be achieved. Would be curious to see more studies about the types of entrepreneurs that build them.
It might be the actual research is more diverse, but they plucked out examples that were more likely to get people interested. Bob's Extruding in Elbow, Alabama might be a key plastic component supplier for the global economy, but nobody's heard of it.
No, you can look at all their briefings here: https://www.generalist.com/briefings. They don't really branch out beyond software startups and big businesses, and don't seem to be interested in smaller-scale entrepreneurship.
Well naturally since all these papers are focused on lottery wining tickets. Running a small to medium sized business is far more relevant to most of us.
The nice thing about this article is it blows some ageist assumptions out of the water. I wasn’t expecting the average founders age to be over 40 in SV.
I learned that a couple months ago and was shocked as well. It could also be a symptom of ageism in the industry: as it becomes harder for those not attracted by the corporate ladder to be hired, they start a business.
I am almost here. Similar age and in a company planing 2nd round of layoffs. I really have no delusions that somebody will want to hire me again. Universities are pumping out thousands of cheaper and better looking graduates. I never saw big corp hiring (in Germany) a graybeard like me for developer role. All the graybeards were so called consultants hired over specific agency. 40 is the magic number I guess.
On the other hand 40 is about the right time, because body and mind is still functional. The network is available and the people skills should be developed even in worst outcasts (there are exceptions). People often have some business ideas and the worthy ones are developed a bit as a hobby. Being fired is the so much needed kick to get started for real.
I am near Munich. There 2 classes in “our” floor: people working for decades in the company and the young guys who come and go. Max age for hiring lies somewhere at 35.
I tell you what its not, being a great engineer. That can help in someways in understanding the technical aspects, but the amount of startups I know who have written incredible clean code with beautiful architecture who have run out of funding compared to the folks who wrote a janky frankensteins monster which they sold to customers, is very high.
> who wrote a janky frankensteins monster which they sold to customers
That's likely because they are focused on building products not fancy toys. No wonder they succeed. Once cash flow is established you can hire workers to tidy things up and argue over what indentation style to use or which shiny new framework to adopt.
Furthermore, we’re now in a far more cash-constrained business environment, and it’s much harder to justify having staff that have a vague impact on the bottom line (“argue over indentation style”, “argue over which shiny new framework to adopt”).
If you're selling an API, you probably cannot afford to have a shitty API design because no one will want to use your API.
If you're selling a B2B product, you can probably have a shitty architecture because it's all internal and B2B app are generally lower scale.
Though in saying that I would expect that B2B products like Snowflake and other 'deep tech' products require good engineering, otherwise the product just wouldn't work.
I'd like to have seen more on the socio-economic background of entrepreneurs - does YC collate this diversity data?
The stuff about the Chinese famine is interesting but I don't think can be generalised beyond China.
My sense is that there are two socio-economic backgrounds that become entrepreneurs - those who are (not to put too fine a point on it) "poor" and so have no assets to risk in starting a company, and those that are "rich" that are also not risking much because their family or others could support them if the company failed.
My primary motivation to start a business was freedom. Having no boss and a ton of spare time. I got lucky and have something almost running on auto pilot. I'm not eager to start another business, I rather enjoy chilling at the pool and browsing HN. I guess this is the opposite of most VC funded YC startups eager to take over the world.
It's a niche platform where subscribers/members post listings where other members respond to. The listings are public and indexed by Google, new customer acquisition is driven by organic trafic and word of mouth.
I've also read a line of thinking that negatively correlates home ownership with entrepreneurship - or sometimes this is operationalised as a high proportion of net worth being accounted for by home ownership rather than other assets.
This paper explores the idea in the UK over time, but I've seen studies out there that examine the idea comparing the UK to other European countries where home ownership is less of an embedded norm:
https://conference.iza.org/conference_files/ESSLE_2012/brack...
Anyhow, very interesting to think that there are human traits at play as in the original article as well as structural/socio-economic factors.
Being a tech entrepreneur seemed so cool in the early 2000s. Tech salaries have exploded so much since then that you're better off with an office job in terms of risk vs. reward, or maybe youtube or substack for those who want to be more entrepreneurial but without owning a business. The whole LLC/business plan route is not as important as it used to be unless you actually think you can create the next Square, Stripe, or Coinbase and can get the VC to write a big check. It does not help either that costs have really surged, such as coding, advertising, fees and regulations (such as Apple App store rules and fees, which are so high and restrictive), and complexity (like coding) compared to the early 2000s, and markets seem more saturated too.
It seems the first reason is root of all the other reasons. If one cannot find a job that pays what they believe they deserve, they are much more likely to start their own business.
The employee market does penalize generalists, those who lack political savvy (ADHD, OCD), and/or those who do not come from well off families and connections.
In the US, inventors (not the same as entrepreneur, but often related) are also disproportionately likely to be immigrants
> We find immigrants represent 16 percent of all US inventors, but produced 23 percent of total innovation output, as measured by number of patents, patent citations, and the economic value of these patents. Immigrant inventors are more likely to rely on foreign technologies, to collaborate with foreign inventors, and to be cited in foreign markets, thus contributing to the importation and diffusion of ideas across borders.
The author looks at a survey of knitters who sell their patterns online to conclude that "hard workers are more likely to become entrepreneurs". Even more comically, they grab a study about Chinese companies founded by the generation born around the time of the Great Famine, to conclude... that childhood adversity makes for better entrepreneurs! Need I say more?
Unsurprisingly, they miss the prime correlation: parental income and access to wealth.
I havent read it all but it doesnt seem to be about entrepreneurs but about innovators. Big difference. If I had to guess, innovators must be misfits whereas entrepreneurs must rather be fiting. So they dont make bombs in kindergarten, they win the class elections.
I ran a large, somewhat infamous hacker house, and watched the beginning of a few unicorn founders. My observation is that everybody talks about being an entrepreneur, but the only people that actually do are the people with no other options. They'll never admit those painful and repeated failures at normal employment, or other areas of normal life. For instance, I have rarely seen men in relationships succeed. Their partner loses respect for them very quickly, and they will spend all their time job hunting until they either take a job or get dumped in horrible embarrassing ways. Partnered women usually end up quitting in disgust or dumping their partners to gain the benefits of being single when soliciting potential investors. Everybody that made it had some kind of family support or side hustle that supported them through it. This is not about money to survive, but some kind of consistent positive affirmation.
One category that I didn't see a lot of is the fully-employed side-hustler, so that may also exist with a completely different set of characteristics.
Incidentally, according to the article, I should be a prototypical entrepreneur, and I've certainly always known this, but, wow, the level of misery I experienced from everybody close to me has been overwhelming every time I've started anything. I've been 'lucky' in the sense of finding some kind of a way into a job when it got to be too much. I've been homeless, I've been to war, I've done ultramarathons, but this is nothing compared to the more normal types of people problems that nobody ever talks about. My plan had always been to make only enough money to survive for a few years of freedom. It turns out that this was easy, but didn't solve the right problem.
As a non-success, I still consider myself one of the lucky ones. I've seen people, who seemed to have it much better than I, get into much worse situations, and several didn't survive it. Steve jobs said you can't connect the dots to success looking forward, and this is obviously also true of disaster. It's easy to forget about these people, or only remember the bad dots.
I think about what to tell my son about all of this. I want him to never feel forced into anything. If he feels good about a job or a relationship, he should feel happy to continue it. But he should know that those things may change to hurt him, and he should never get into a situation where he feels stuck. One important thing about this is that I believe that the law and the culture is strongly against him, and seems to be getting worse. He should not expect success in this environment, and I'd advise that it may be wise to go somewhere less hostile, even at the expense of financial opportunity. Most young people don't realize that the majority of middle-aged men in this country are legally barred from leaving their state of residence without permission.
So the conditions for success seem simple, and the people that win big often don't seem very impressive, but the failure conditions are often larger and more hidden than most people understand early in life. You're not competing just with your mind, but your entire life situation to support your ideas.
> "Partnered women usually end up quitting in disgust or dumping their partners to gain the benefits of being single when soliciting potential investors"
> "Most young people don't realize that the majority of middle-aged men in this country are legally barred from leaving their state of residence without permission."
I am curious whether you'd like to elaborate on these points you made above.
Which just goes to show that all the studies in the world don't mean a whole lot :)
I guess it depends on your definition of "entrepreneur" - does it count if you only found 1 company?
But from where I stand I pretty much fail all the "high probability" criteria, no troubled past, no mental health issues, no previous employment history, no bad-childhood, and do on. Arguably I'm "well rounded" (for some definition of that. Yay!)
So to aspiring entrepreneurs let me say, indicators don't really matter to _you_ as an individual. These are not _requirements_, they are indicators.
Starting a business is not for the faint hearted though. You'll work more hours, probably for less money, possibly for no money, and you'll likely fail.
You need more than just desire, you need a product people want, that they can afford, and you need a way to reach that market. And some luck. Did I mention you'll likely fail?
Success isn't bei g a billionaire, success is keeping the doors open, drawing a salary, employing others in a non-exploitive way, not grinding away every second. Success is taking time off to spend with family, or playing sport, or whatever, just because you can.
To those just starting out I say, welcome to the biggest adventure of all.
> Success isn't bei g a billionaire, success is keeping the doors open, drawing a salary, employing others in a non-exploitive way, not grinding away every second. Success is taking time off to spend with family, or playing sport, or whatever, just because you can.
Success is whatever you want it to be. And that, to me, is the point of entrepreneurship: Defining your own success and getting there on your own terms.
But of all the people, those who show jealousy acts are often the ones who say success is having less money and more time with family. Then you show them “Hey, you have 3 kids, a loving wife, just enough money to get by which is both what you’ve always said was sufficient and what you voted for (while you voted for the richer single men getting slashed), meanwhile I’m autistic, have no wife or kid, I’m rich like Cresus as a nice kickback from spending my Sundays at work… and you still have to be jealous???”
If it were on my own terms, I would have chosen to be able to join improv groups and invite them all home without having a tantrum thrown because I don’t contribute more than the rest of the group. Money doesn’t equate universal power.
Age can be a key factor too. I asked a VC once what were the key things they looked at. They came out with the expected answers, passion, vision , plan of execution and then said age. I expected they meant a someone in their early twenties to be then be told 'nope', if some middle aged industry vets walk in they immediately sit up in their chairs a little more.
There's probably two reasons for this. The obvious one is that the person is more likely to have relevant experience in some field were they probably identified an issue they are trying to solve. This is even more true in the B2B world were a early 20s kind of person simply didn't have the exposure to critical pain points.
The second more subtle point is that someone older is likely to be settled (job/family/money) and switching to a startup requires more intrinsic motivation to do it for the "right reasons". If you have two kids and a somewhat set job at a FAANG or big corp or whatever there must be something really bothering you to give that up. So ceteris paribus I'd assume the older person is far less likely to come in there because they want to "work on something cool", "yolo-startup can still rebuild later swing for the fences" or "this is the path to all the moneyz" and more likely to come there because they see the value of solving the problem they have identified and assume all else will sort of follow.
If you study 10 entrepreneurs you will find 11 different paths they took in their journey. While this is a good read, the advice to everyone looking for the "secret sauce" to starting a successful venture remains the same – there is none. You can try to emulate Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or whoever else all you want. The moment you idea meets the real world you will be in completely unfamiliar territory with no operating manual and have to just...figure it out.
The secret sauce is generational wealth. People whose parents are extremely well off have a larger chance at succeeding in building their business. Not only does their parents have money, but also the right connections at that wealth level. They basically manufacture their own luck, and their money buys time and labor to get their product first to market.
Sometimes the average joe can taste certain components of that secret sauce, because they're brilliant and hard-working, and was at the right time and place. But it's a very rare occurrence.
VC does not only offer money but also connections. Even more so does YC and their startup school. If that's not enough, a unicorn is waiting to combine kickstarter.com and a social network to allow people to monetize their connections.
The limiting factor is the willingness to give up the comfort of a 9-5 job. In a world of working spouses, one partner can always risk their career, especially when the children have grown up a bit.
Paul Orfalea had trouble in school and couldn't hold a job. He started Kinko's because selling things to students that he knew they needed was about all he could do. By carefully building an organization that can use modest employees to serve modest needs he ended up building a business that he sold for around five billion dollars. That isn't a story about secret sauce or generational wealth. It is a story about desperation and making one's own way after being shut out of other opportunities. That seems to emphasize the many ways model over your preferred wealth dominated narrative. Of course wealth may be involved, but that is just one of many potential driving factors.
Steve Jobs was a master of this. The first car itself was heavily marketed before release. You have to make people believe that their life will be improved by this thing. Failure to do so, even when you genuinely believe it can improve lives, will leave you in the dust while someone else eventually comes along with a nicer story.
Of course, if you don't even believe in your hypothetical rubbish product it's hard to make that storytelling believable. Even more so when you've become so deluded in your own thing that you can't tell what impact it does have.
I used Linux as my main desktop OS for like 15 years. One day someone paid me to write some Mac software for them. I did the project on a $150 ancient mac from a second hand store, and partially on Linux.
When the project ended I bought a new macbook when i got paid because i thought "ok, there's money in doing mac stuff, i better have current hardware". Linux was still my main desktop OS.
2 years later I switched my desktop to Mac OS too because after using it, it was simply far less annoying than either alternative.
So when you see people talking about the reality distortion field and why pay extra for Macs... take it with a grain of salt. It's likely they just looked at prices and guessed it's not worth it, maybe thought about induced want. So was I before I got paid to use one :)
The true is Windows 10/11, Linux and MacOs are all terrible desktop operating systems. Windows 2000 for example was better than any current OS. It comes down to what types of bugs and issues you're more inclined to tolerate.
It’s easy to choose a career in entrepreneurship when you either have enough inheritance wealth to not need to work OR living in poverty where there’s not much lower you could drop. For those in the middle, entrepreneurship comes with likely too great a risk to be worthwhile.
I'm not sure that's true given that immigrants are 80% more likely to start a business than people born in the U.S.[0]. That's the case in almost every country[1].
Wouldn't that fit the second criteria since many first generation immigrants don't have the requisite language skills to compete with the native population for middle class jobs.
A fair amount of immigrants are less likely to have resources like capital or relationships to accommodate a different path so parent is likely right that they are somewhat forced onto path of entrepreneur.
As an entrepreneur twice over, it had everything to do with being able to spend the most productive hours of my day on being an entrepreneur and being armed with basic full stack web development skills.
I had zero success in entrepreneurship in my 20s and I was delusional to think I could accomplish anything in entrepreneurship without both of those properties (and I tried multiple times a year for the decade of my 20s). It would take someone truly amazing* to pull off starting a successful business while working a full-time job.
* And I say that in contrast to myself, who has been called talented more than a few times by my managers and still couldn't pull it off until I earned enough money to take time off
I was in the process of learning it at the end of my 20s but hadn't quite gotten there until the cusp of 29/30. I did firmware, data science, physics research, and developed a scientific software framework before that.
Those who can afford to immigrant to western countries are not poor people at home country. If they failed in new country, they have option to go back to own country where they will have good quality of life as compare to new country.
We came to the US with a few suit cases and had to abandon all property in our home country. In general, many immigrants move to start over due to the relative lack of opportunity at home, whether due to politics, crime, economy, whatever.
I do agree with the original point. Nowadays, most STEM PhD students at top US schools are immigrants. When I look at the work, delayed gratification, etc, native Americans forgoing a STEM PhD seems a rather rational choice. Starting a company feels like a similar decision.. a lot of pain for statistically low gain.
When I look at where we would be if I had kept the job, we would be homeowners, be able to buy new clothes regularly, go to restaurants and take awesome vacations a few times a year.
But the missing thing would be autonomy. The reason why I’m willing to sacrifice so much is because i fundamentally don’t like having to follow orders from a boss or manager. I’m arrogant enough to think i know better, and want to prove it by actually building my own thing.
Regardless of how silly it sounds on a financial level, the calculation makes sense once we look at the sense of ownership and autonomy over our own work. It’s worth more to me than any money I could make.
Ps: if you’re curious, the startup is logology.co