This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. Given enough chances you will make it, big. That means the #1 factor in success is the number of chances you get to fail and try again, not necessarily how inherently good you are. I try to remind myself of this often. I have been given so many chances, and I took them.
This always sounded intuitively correct to me, but looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net. They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
Who are you thinking of? Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk all came from wealthy families. They all had the safety net of their family wealth if their business didn’t work out. Even someone who had parents to pay their student loans is relatively privileged, not everyone starts their 20’s debt-free and able to take financial risks.
I've seen quite a few of these funded entrepreneur-lifestyle kids now; I've worked (briefly) with many of their companies. Many of them are making enough of a real go at it such that I can't tell them from others, but quite a few don't know enough about how a default alive business works and deliver a DoA even when the core idea or a short pivot works and has traction - these guys need so much better PMF to succeed.
The best businesses I've seen parents find for their children are lettings agents (urgh) and basic manufacturing (last mile door assembly etc.). You can get the business model in a six month course, the staff are minimum wage, the product is high margin. If your parents buy the building you are so close to default alive its a joke. Grow the business, flip it, and try the big idea.
I believe we all intuitively push whatever our advantages are, often without even knowing it. The advantage that the wealthy have are connections, capital, and familial support. These advantages lend themselves to activities such as starting businesses with high capital requirements, accumulating assets (“investing”), working through elite colleges to land a prestigious position, heading a philanthropy or charity, etc.
That advantage comes with a disadvantage. Because the wealthy do not have to work to earn their start, they never learn what hard work is capable of producing, and never build the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” habit. What they have in money, they lack in grit. When they are faced with a challenge, they habitually say “what can I buy to solve this problem?”, “who can I consult to help me with this problem?”, etc.
Contrast that with folks who are working class. They know that they don’t have the advantage of money. They learn that hard work is the behavior that yields the best outcome. They put themselves in fields where what you get is proportional to what you put in, such as the trades, where working long, hard hours can generate quite good income.
When folks who were raised working class are faced with adversity, they handle the situation like Boxer from Animal Farm: “I will work harder”. It’s what they know how to do. While they don’t have copious sums of money to fall back on, or other natural advantages, their own work ethic is one of the few things that cannot be taken away from them, and so they leverage that.
That advantage also comes with disadvantages. Someone who works very hard will likely be overly self reliant. They might not get as much done as they could have had they spread the load across other people. They might burn themselves out, injure themselves, work to the exclusion of all other goals in life, etc.
These are vast generalizations that obviously won’t hold in all circumstances, but I think it’s useful to illustrate the point. People use the tools at their disposal, whether that be money or otherwise. Those strategies all have advantages and disadvantages. The net result of those is likely visible in the outcomes of various people, I’d bet.
I’d expect it to stratify based on the kind of business.
Typical small businesses (plumbing, HVAC, restaurants, convenience stores) I’d expect to come from poorer families. These businesses are a potential avenue to success without traditional credentials, and they’re not the sort of thing somebody is likely to start as a passion.
From wealthy families, I’d expect vanity businesses. There wouldn’t be as much motivation for the annoying aspects of a real business. And anyone who is interested in business can probably get a nice start in something their family owns or has a major stake in.
Moonshot companies I’d expect to come from the upper middle class, children of doctors and such. Not fabulously wealthy, so the potential for making millions can still be a big motivator. But comfortable enough to get advanced schooling and be willing to aim big with a chance of failure, rather than going for something mundane you know is always in demand, like fixing pipes.
Off the top of my head, Gates, Page, and Zuckerberg all fit that mold.
Good to share, but n=1 I suppose. For me (also n=1) it's the opposite in my circle. The ones without resources never went anywhere and reproduced their parents' class. The ones with resources that went into entrepreneurship (and had the possibility of failing and still being fine) are the most successful.
Agreed on your final point though! Tenacity probably is the biggest driver.
Every single western "entrepreneur" who starts making a little more than 100k/year likes to tell itself this story.
Did you have any (real, not GenZ) mental or physical disability?
Did you have a house to come back to every day? Did you have a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wanted?
Did you have a community that supported you through your business?
Did you have a legal structure around you that allowed you not to worry about getting kidnapped/killed? A structure that enforces getting paid after you've earned your money?
98% of what you have was given.
I do agree, however, that a lot of people don't even bother to put in the remaining 2%.
Growing up I thought that my family was rich because my parents were still together, we owned a home with a foundation with help from the bank, and my family was clean. It turns out the bar was real low in my hometown.
"...didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net" As someone who grew up considered both a dirt poor hick by the city slickers and simultaneously a carpet-baggin outsider, this is often a relative perspective, how do we calibrate against a larger population?
These are the sorts of things I picked up on growing up: Could they go to college if they wanted to? Did their parents go to college? Did they live homeless, apartments, trailers, multi family, single family homes, McMansions? 0/1/2 parents around?
I suspect HackerNews may have some survivorship bias compared to national averages, (and especially where I grew up).
If most successful entrepreneurs are from ordinary backgrounds, one explanation is that most entrepreneurs, successful or unsuccessful, are from ordinary backgrounds. Another is that wealthy families might be pushing kids into entrepreneurship who lack the talent or taste for it.
When did you meet the successful entrepreneurs and business owners? Because unless you met them when they were starting out survivorship bias would account for that.
> over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know
This very much sounds like survivorship bias to me.
But more importantly, I think the discussion is going off the track. The important ones are the 0.1%, not the 1% or 10%. The "normal" millionaire business owner usually actually worked for it (unless they are pure finance or something similar). They are also not the ones shifting a whole country's politics with their enormous influence. They don't have any over-inflated influence over anything. They are not the problem.
But they also don't serve as examples for the masses, because that would be confusing "anyone can do this" with "everyone can do this" - their successes don't scale. You can only have that many successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, the majority must be their worker bees by necessity.
I see such discussions as distractions. If you talk about normal entrepreneurship you will not get to the core of our problems, not at the very top (the super rich), not at the bottom (why are so many so poor).
If you want to come up with an idea that works at scale you can't use one that only works for some no matter what. If you want to come up with a solution for the enormous imbalances looking at those normal entrepreneurs does not help either.
I suggest to develop an instinct to use in these kinds of discussions: For every concrete example, imagine it at scale. Thinking at individual examples when you talk about big things is a mismatch. Those examples are only useful if you use them to extrapolate upwards, what would actually happen if everybody did this?
I also disagree with the GP (with the definitive explanation; it's probably at least partially true), but this:
>> basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net.
is not statisically accurate; you're only looking at survivors. The successful Gates/Zucks/Musks might outnumber the poor Indian kids; we need both the failure counts and some sort of qualitive definition of success/failure (i.e. a rich-kid failure is probably not life destroying)
Is this statistically true or just your experience? I'd be very surprised if it was more than just anecdotal.
> They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Lots of well-resourced kids do this and more can do this. By the law of averages they should be overrepresented in successes here.
> When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
Does needing to succeed make businesses succeed? I don't think so, tbh.
The defeatist attitude in the reply’s to this comment are unreal. Try hard or don’t. It’s up to you. At least with the one way you might have a chance.
If so, this is one of the questions that matters most when assessing whether or not there was a safety net— in failing, did they either wind up at the destitute/homeless/food-bank level, or a mountain of unpaid debt holding back future endeavors?
If the ones who met with failure didn’t face these things or something comparable then they did have safety nets.
> looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net
There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).
That's kind of true. If you have a safety net, you kind of make the wrong decisions, optimize stuff that doesn't cut through the noise and leave something on the track. It's like that scene in Dark Knight Rises where he only makes the impossible jump out of the prison when he doesn't have the safety rope.
Would be interesting to run the priors on this and say what is the probability of startup success given "rich" "middle class" and "poor".
Otherwise maybe more poor people try startups so success will be biased towards them (rich will take over daddy or mommy business... maybe take a shot at a startup for fun but say meh lets try the business, plus there are waaaaay fewer rich).
Or to put it another way: Most people who live >100 are also from modest backgrounds too. As are olympic gold winners. Us paupers are the best!
you can extend that to all Silicon Valley and the US in general.
It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
It's like a baseball game. Most people are benched their whole lives. They never get a chance at the plate. More privileged people with a lucky combination of the right family, the right education, the right timing, and the right opportunity get an at-bat, and they'll either strike out, or hit the ball. A few very lucky people will get to stand at the plate maybe once or twice more.
The wealthy get infinite at-bats. They get to stand at the plate for however long they want, and swing and swing until they get their home run. I worked with a founder like this. He would always talk about his business's humble beginnings, starting from a garage and so on--you know the story. What he would neglect to admit was this was like his 7th try. Every time he failed, he'd just chill on his family's couch, dreaming up his next startup idea.
I think it was Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) that talked about a similar concept as well. Ignoring the 10k hour thing, it also talks abut small compounding advantages that later add up to more opportunity (for those that take it).
To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill.
There was also a similar concept floating around about darts, where the poor get maybe one dart to throw, middle class a few and wealthier get many. But I can't remember where I saw or read that
This is not true. No matter how many different teams I try out for, I as a 51 year old short male with a limp will never be a star basketball player or ever make it to even the D leagues.
There are plenty of people who tried repeatedly to “succeed” in their own company and failed. Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress
> Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress.
Some people would succeed eventually, others wouldn’t. I think it’s really hard to effectively gauge what the chances are cause you’ll see a lot of survivorship bias and a bunch of grifters with courses and blogs and stuff that try to pass it off as a reproducible skill.
I wonder what dataset would show real world outcomes well, especially since failed startups won’t be catalogued as well as people trying to enter the dining business and most of them going under.
I think the level of success one wants also require having a check for delusion and realism. If a "51 year old short limp" thinks they are going to be a star basketball player, they are delusional and no longer realistic.
If your energy is finite (which is normally the case), the effect may also depend on the energy per shot you spend. A birdshot allows you to hit great many possible targets, but only very weakly. A buckshot hits fewer targets, but packs a bit more punch. A FMJ bullet shot from a sniper rifle allows you to hit an exact target with a great force, but you have to choose carefully.
What worked for me best was looking around a lot, identifying a few worthy targets, and aiming well.
Both Romans and Mongols have lost/retreated many battles. They just had to regroup and raise another army over and over again. Some of their opponents could not even afford the war even after winning over them multiple times.
The other sides simply were more fragile, where you were defending and once your city falls, you are done.
Avoid risk of ruin. Keep the ability of taking multiple shots with upside in your favor.
The key ingredient is the courage to try, not the safety net. Countries lauded for their strong safety nets are not overflowing with people taking ambitious risks. Often quite the opposite; the strong safety net reflects a cultural aversion to risk.
People with the courage to try don’t need a safety net to do it. In practice they seem to be almost inversely correlated.
An important aspect not mentioned is feeling like you will be adequately rewarded if your calculated risks pay off. This seems to be more pertinent than safety nets in practice.
On a personal level, if you take risks, there is a good chance for you to just fail and be forgotten to history. You can make it big, but is it worth the risk?
On a country level, it is different. With millions of people trying, some of them will succeed. To produce high achievers, a country doesn't need to provide people with a safety net, it only needs to produce a lot of people.
That is insightful. Courage to take risks means higher standard deviation in outcomes, more visible successes, but also more hard failures. Risk averse cultures have more stable outcomes, no big successes, but also less financially crippling failures. A personal or social safety net may or may not make you risk averse. Taking semi-calculated risks seems like a skill that needs to be learned for successful entrepreneurship.
That said, being inherently good also helps. I know (several) people who knocked it out of the park with literally their first attempt out of university in their early 20s. It wasn't just luck, they are genuinly unusually talented.
Not sure I 100% agree. First: you can temper you ambition and thus the risk. You do not need to go ALL IN for almost anything. It may take longer or be fractional vs. the initial ambitions but probably also far more realistic. Second: the counter example of succeeding because you NEED to; the "burn the ships!" approach. If you know you can fail it inevitably tempers your efforts too. You might not want to do this if you're the sole bread winner for an entire family, but when you're young and independent? Maybe. Combine this with the first and I think there's lots of paths to success.
I dunno... based on having worked for ~10 small to midsize companies now and getting to interact frequently with the founders at almost all of them, I wouldn't say a safety net was the common thread.
They were however all highly driven, a bit sociopathic, insanely confident and had some kind of chip on their shoulder. A few wanted to "beat daddy", some had wealthy wives and wanted to fit in with their in-laws, and others just seemed mad at something or someone in their industry and wanted to outdo them.
The #1 factor for success imo is being angry with reality and being arrogant enough to think you should impose your will on it. People who are given infinite chances will just fail a few times and settle into a safe life.
That sounds good, but with a safety net, are you really going to be hungry enough to make sure your one shot at getting out of the ghetto doesn't fail? The entrepreneur that says to themselves, if this doesn't work, I'll just ask mom for another $300k at St Barts over Christmas doesn't sound like the one sleeping under the desk at the office to get the demo ready for TechCrunch Disrupt. Or maybe they are (to prove daddy wrong). The human condition contains multitudes.
> This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful.
The idea of a safety net is a silly idea. The whole world had very little safety net just 100 years ago, and we still managed fine to make progress and to get out of poverty (on average).
On the contrary, when you know you have very little safety net, you tend to try harder and to persevere a lot more.
> The idea of electricity is a silly idea. The whole world had very little electricity just 100 years ago. and we still managed fine to make progress
This is just an argument from tradition and not even a good one. It's debatable (and maybe impossible to prove) if it's even true. 100 years ago, the global economy fell into a huge decline that led to more global safety nets. Then, were there even less safety nets 50 years ago? And did that lack of existence not hinder progress?
> you tend to try harder
Is there any actual evidence for this? If I don't have a social net, I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to try harder at my risky, innovative product. I'm going to give up and do something 'safe' that only marginally increases economic output.
This is definitely not true. How many people for instance can go into journalism and do unpaid internships without family support?
The entire idea of most entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in tech is a myth. Out of all of major tech companies now, how many of the founders came from disadvantaged backgrounds?
Safety net and resources correlates heavily in almost all aspects of your life, having a better life helps immensely in any project you do in your life, including entrepreneurship
> A safety net and family resources correlate with nothing related to entrepeneurship and risk taking
You might be on to something, just look at the examples here. Being successful in tech and a well-known risk taker seems strongly related to having a 4-5 letter last name. Bezos, Brin, Dell, Gates, Page, Jobs, Musk, Thiel...Zuckerberg, okay an outlier, but everyone just says Zuck -- so tossup?/s
The “one that works out” can also give you a misrepresentation of how the world works and a false sense of how lucky one should expect to be over a long period of time.
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
I have thrown away (in hindsight) amazing lottery tickets a hilarious number of times. Despite that poor track record, I have been able to grind out an enviable life sans lottery ticket. Showing up and being hungry is a huge part of the game. I’ve also had to reboot my career relatively late, which isn’t a place you want to be but it isn’t a death sentence if you don’t want it to be.
While there is an element of survivor bias to my story, people always underestimate the role of stamina and willingness to grind when no one else would. It is a very long game but so is life. I was never looking for the easiest way, and in hindsight I think that produced more satisfying results even if the path had much lower lows.
Well with the style of tech interviews we have, luck is definitely involved. Some questions are simply my style (I like graphs and dynamic programming for example), and I’m lucky if the interviewer happens to choose these. But I don’t like for example two pointers problems.
And also I’ve long ago dissociated my tech interview performance with my actual performance indicated by performance reviews.
Corollary: Choosing _not_ to do something is as much an action as choosing _to_ do something. Which shines a bright light on the meaninglessness of the phrase “the only actions regretted are those not taken”.
There's also the option of choosing to not commit to either action. One stays in the status quo without choosing it, but since agency is negatively correlated with regret and no agency was used, the 'choosing not to do something' option probably has a higher chance of being regretted.
A lot of people experienced that during the 2020 boom. The lucky break wasn't a lucky break it was just a huge hiring boom. Once that's over the status quo returns.
Lol same. Left a great tech company where was doing well to pursue the startup life. "If I work hard, I will make it". Startup failed, and the same prior opportunity hasn't come around. Such is life.
There was a time 10-15 years ago when there was a lot of discussion (including here on hn) on whether it's best to stay at a fang job or join a startup. It was basically a choice between making millions at a steady but intellectually unrewarding job or risking it all at a fun startup.
To land at the the author's difficulty level, you need to not have chronic life-shifting catastrophes. That is, the sort of challenges that slot your life in a place where the long reaches are to keep housing and hopefully have food for the kids.
I started out where the author was. Well, roughly. +Kids, -Secondary edu. I could and did rise above that. And above 3 economy shifts that each reset my biz to zero.
I did not rise above my spouse being swapped for an adult with profound psych issues. I took on the single dad and caregiver roles well enough.
However, I could not overcome the daily sabotage of, well, everything. It's like a TV trope where you are shackled to your worst enemy. But you have to keep them safe and your loved ones safe from them.
It's tough to maintain a job schedule when the police frequently call you during the workday (w and w/o CPS). Or when your transpo is stolen and can't be replaced.
In short, it's particular tough to pretend to be stable. Eventually there are no bridges left to burn.
Seeing the other comments I feel like the luckiest moment of my life was meeting my future wife when I was at school with 16 and having been together since for 20+ years, through higher education and kids and house mortgage and all. Zero drama, mutual respect and affection, both still preserving some independence to maintain a „self“, good double income.
Might sound stupid, but this major life area being just a rock solid fundament frees up so much energy my peers still struggle with nowadays quite often it’s insane in hindsight. Everyday life costs are lower, some risk taking is possible when someone has your back unconditionally and even supports it (as long as not going reckless), and a secure home base to return to is something I guess even money can’t easily buy. Short of being born already rich I guess that’s a cheat code with similar small odds, and I appreciate it.
Then the „business opportunities“ become just something way more relaxed. Not identity level validation attempts or despair to get into a better life. Which again allows better judgement calls and reintroduces more fun and creativity into many things.
Unfortunately, the "one" which accepts you, is no guarantee of it being the one which "works out" (in the short or long term). My experience is now 4x "found one that ultimately doesn't work out" (each lasting 2 to 3 years).
I'm now taking time out to try to figure out how to escape the confines of the career path I've taken to find something different.
Open to suggestions of entirely different careers that I could switch to that might have higher odds of not being toxic rat-races full of people telling lies and bullshit just to survive.
But broader experience suggests the world of work just sucks these days (and yes, it's these days - our parent's generation had a brief period of doing 9-to-5 jobs which paid well enough to afford homes, have families and social lives and holidays. We don't get that now.). No wonder large numbers of my generation are dropping out of the workforce...
Maybe move to a different country with a better work culture? I don't know where you are from, I'm from Belgium and the only truly toxic corporate places I've seen here were the ones managed by Americans.
I think any huge tech company or private equity owned company will be a rat race. There are plenty of tech jobs that don’t fall under that umbrella. They might not pay as well, but they’re out there!
We job hop, have multiple hustles. Many people on this board have started multiple companies, sometimes at once, on an ongoing basis. Do you only want just one friend? People tend to have multiple romantic/sexual entanglements, sometimes at once, but generally more than one over a lifetime.
I think this can be a useful maxim to get you to the next day, but in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life. We grow and change and need novelty. We are held in a web of interdependent, ever-shifting relationships - with people, businesses, material goods, ecology. I think that generally people are seeking connection in a broader sphere. To be held in community, to have multiple significant identities (mother/wife/boss), to live in richness and abundance where any one thing is not make or break.
> in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life
We seem to view "reality" through different lenses. I've usually found "one" to be a magic number; as long as it's the "right one." That's the gist of what he's saying.
In my experience, needing more than one, often signals issues that need closer examination.
In my community, we have a joke: "An addict is someone that needs two One-A-Days."
I find the same, individual jobs or relationships seem to give supralinear returns.
There's a lot of initial investment and groundworks, then once you're well-integrated, the marginal returns get higher for the most established relationships.
We can try to walk in 10-20 directions at the same time and move a tiny direction all, or none.
Or we can realize we have some things to learn that we will learn no matter whether we pick the startup, or job to learn transferrable skills and also become better well rounded.
Do you really think that is what the author meant? They're not saying "you only need 1". They're talking about going from 0 to 1. It's sometimes a long and arduous 0. Your framing doesn't help someone trying to get from 0 to 1. Once they're at 1 though, sure. But getting there can feel helpless, and that's what this post is about.
The trouble is how many times can you try. I tired building 6 businesses; all failed. I just don't have the resources to try again. I've lost too much. I am lucky to have been able to try at all. Like that parable floating around about the people and the carnival games, the rich own the game, the poor run the games and the middle class get a chance or two to play.
Readit News
Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
The best businesses I've seen parents find for their children are lettings agents (urgh) and basic manufacturing (last mile door assembly etc.). You can get the business model in a six month course, the staff are minimum wage, the product is high margin. If your parents buy the building you are so close to default alive its a joke. Grow the business, flip it, and try the big idea.
Succeeding without safety net is hard -> only the best can do it -> the best entrepreneurs you know did not had a safety net
That advantage comes with a disadvantage. Because the wealthy do not have to work to earn their start, they never learn what hard work is capable of producing, and never build the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” habit. What they have in money, they lack in grit. When they are faced with a challenge, they habitually say “what can I buy to solve this problem?”, “who can I consult to help me with this problem?”, etc.
Contrast that with folks who are working class. They know that they don’t have the advantage of money. They learn that hard work is the behavior that yields the best outcome. They put themselves in fields where what you get is proportional to what you put in, such as the trades, where working long, hard hours can generate quite good income.
When folks who were raised working class are faced with adversity, they handle the situation like Boxer from Animal Farm: “I will work harder”. It’s what they know how to do. While they don’t have copious sums of money to fall back on, or other natural advantages, their own work ethic is one of the few things that cannot be taken away from them, and so they leverage that.
That advantage also comes with disadvantages. Someone who works very hard will likely be overly self reliant. They might not get as much done as they could have had they spread the load across other people. They might burn themselves out, injure themselves, work to the exclusion of all other goals in life, etc.
These are vast generalizations that obviously won’t hold in all circumstances, but I think it’s useful to illustrate the point. People use the tools at their disposal, whether that be money or otherwise. Those strategies all have advantages and disadvantages. The net result of those is likely visible in the outcomes of various people, I’d bet.
Typical small businesses (plumbing, HVAC, restaurants, convenience stores) I’d expect to come from poorer families. These businesses are a potential avenue to success without traditional credentials, and they’re not the sort of thing somebody is likely to start as a passion.
From wealthy families, I’d expect vanity businesses. There wouldn’t be as much motivation for the annoying aspects of a real business. And anyone who is interested in business can probably get a nice start in something their family owns or has a major stake in.
Moonshot companies I’d expect to come from the upper middle class, children of doctors and such. Not fabulously wealthy, so the potential for making millions can still be a big motivator. But comfortable enough to get advanced schooling and be willing to aim big with a chance of failure, rather than going for something mundane you know is always in demand, like fixing pipes.
Off the top of my head, Gates, Page, and Zuckerberg all fit that mold.
Agreed on your final point though! Tenacity probably is the biggest driver.
Did you have any (real, not GenZ) mental or physical disability?
Did you have a house to come back to every day? Did you have a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wanted?
Did you have a community that supported you through your business?
Did you have a legal structure around you that allowed you not to worry about getting kidnapped/killed? A structure that enforces getting paid after you've earned your money?
98% of what you have was given.
I do agree, however, that a lot of people don't even bother to put in the remaining 2%.
"...didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net" As someone who grew up considered both a dirt poor hick by the city slickers and simultaneously a carpet-baggin outsider, this is often a relative perspective, how do we calibrate against a larger population?
These are the sorts of things I picked up on growing up: Could they go to college if they wanted to? Did their parents go to college? Did they live homeless, apartments, trailers, multi family, single family homes, McMansions? 0/1/2 parents around?
I suspect HackerNews may have some survivorship bias compared to national averages, (and especially where I grew up).
This very much sounds like survivorship bias to me.
But more importantly, I think the discussion is going off the track. The important ones are the 0.1%, not the 1% or 10%. The "normal" millionaire business owner usually actually worked for it (unless they are pure finance or something similar). They are also not the ones shifting a whole country's politics with their enormous influence. They don't have any over-inflated influence over anything. They are not the problem.
But they also don't serve as examples for the masses, because that would be confusing "anyone can do this" with "everyone can do this" - their successes don't scale. You can only have that many successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, the majority must be their worker bees by necessity.
I see such discussions as distractions. If you talk about normal entrepreneurship you will not get to the core of our problems, not at the very top (the super rich), not at the bottom (why are so many so poor).
If you want to come up with an idea that works at scale you can't use one that only works for some no matter what. If you want to come up with a solution for the enormous imbalances looking at those normal entrepreneurs does not help either.
I suggest to develop an instinct to use in these kinds of discussions: For every concrete example, imagine it at scale. Thinking at individual examples when you talk about big things is a mismatch. Those examples are only useful if you use them to extrapolate upwards, what would actually happen if everybody did this?
>> basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net.
is not statisically accurate; you're only looking at survivors. The successful Gates/Zucks/Musks might outnumber the poor Indian kids; we need both the failure counts and some sort of qualitive definition of success/failure (i.e. a rich-kid failure is probably not life destroying)
> They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Lots of well-resourced kids do this and more can do this. By the law of averages they should be overrepresented in successes here.
> When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
Does needing to succeed make businesses succeed? I don't think so, tbh.
If so, this is one of the questions that matters most when assessing whether or not there was a safety net— in failing, did they either wind up at the destitute/homeless/food-bank level, or a mountain of unpaid debt holding back future endeavors?
If the ones who met with failure didn’t face these things or something comparable then they did have safety nets.
There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).
Otherwise maybe more poor people try startups so success will be biased towards them (rich will take over daddy or mommy business... maybe take a shot at a startup for fun but say meh lets try the business, plus there are waaaaay fewer rich).
Or to put it another way: Most people who live >100 are also from modest backgrounds too. As are olympic gold winners. Us paupers are the best!
It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
The wealthy get infinite at-bats. They get to stand at the plate for however long they want, and swing and swing until they get their home run. I worked with a founder like this. He would always talk about his business's humble beginnings, starting from a garage and so on--you know the story. What he would neglect to admit was this was like his 7th try. Every time he failed, he'd just chill on his family's couch, dreaming up his next startup idea.
To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill.
There was also a similar concept floating around about darts, where the poor get maybe one dart to throw, middle class a few and wealthier get many. But I can't remember where I saw or read that
There are plenty of people who tried repeatedly to “succeed” in their own company and failed. Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress
Some people would succeed eventually, others wouldn’t. I think it’s really hard to effectively gauge what the chances are cause you’ll see a lot of survivorship bias and a bunch of grifters with courses and blogs and stuff that try to pass it off as a reproducible skill.
I wonder what dataset would show real world outcomes well, especially since failed startups won’t be catalogued as well as people trying to enter the dining business and most of them going under.
What worked for me best was looking around a lot, identifying a few worthy targets, and aiming well.
Both Romans and Mongols have lost/retreated many battles. They just had to regroup and raise another army over and over again. Some of their opponents could not even afford the war even after winning over them multiple times.
The other sides simply were more fragile, where you were defending and once your city falls, you are done.
Avoid risk of ruin. Keep the ability of taking multiple shots with upside in your favor.
Money: do it while you’re young and don’t need a lot. Or get first rich. Or collect enough money on a dream.
Energy: again being young helps. Having 2 smalls kids and old parents doesn’t.
Patience: that’s the more esoterical part. It’s hard to know when to keep on grinding and when to quit.
People with the courage to try don’t need a safety net to do it. In practice they seem to be almost inversely correlated.
An important aspect not mentioned is feeling like you will be adequately rewarded if your calculated risks pay off. This seems to be more pertinent than safety nets in practice.
On a personal level, if you take risks, there is a good chance for you to just fail and be forgotten to history. You can make it big, but is it worth the risk?
On a country level, it is different. With millions of people trying, some of them will succeed. To produce high achievers, a country doesn't need to provide people with a safety net, it only needs to produce a lot of people.
I think the newer iteration is just setting the country for failure and is an excuse why being lazy is okay
They were however all highly driven, a bit sociopathic, insanely confident and had some kind of chip on their shoulder. A few wanted to "beat daddy", some had wealthy wives and wanted to fit in with their in-laws, and others just seemed mad at something or someone in their industry and wanted to outdo them.
The #1 factor for success imo is being angry with reality and being arrogant enough to think you should impose your will on it. People who are given infinite chances will just fail a few times and settle into a safe life.
For what? Their garbage SaaS that barely works and is just a thin veneer for advertisers to gorge on my data?
The idea of a safety net is a silly idea. The whole world had very little safety net just 100 years ago, and we still managed fine to make progress and to get out of poverty (on average).
On the contrary, when you know you have very little safety net, you tend to try harder and to persevere a lot more.
This is just an argument from tradition and not even a good one. It's debatable (and maybe impossible to prove) if it's even true. 100 years ago, the global economy fell into a huge decline that led to more global safety nets. Then, were there even less safety nets 50 years ago? And did that lack of existence not hinder progress?
> you tend to try harder
Is there any actual evidence for this? If I don't have a social net, I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to try harder at my risky, innovative product. I'm going to give up and do something 'safe' that only marginally increases economic output.
The entire idea of most entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in tech is a myth. Out of all of major tech companies now, how many of the founders came from disadvantaged backgrounds?
You might be on to something, just look at the examples here. Being successful in tech and a well-known risk taker seems strongly related to having a 4-5 letter last name. Bezos, Brin, Dell, Gates, Page, Jobs, Musk, Thiel...Zuckerberg, okay an outlier, but everyone just says Zuck -- so tossup?/s
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
While there is an element of survivor bias to my story, people always underestimate the role of stamina and willingness to grind when no one else would. It is a very long game but so is life. I was never looking for the easiest way, and in hindsight I think that produced more satisfying results even if the path had much lower lows.
And also I’ve long ago dissociated my tech interview performance with my actual performance indicated by performance reviews.
Dead Comment
>Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere
Never mind, it's been written or at least edited by ChatGPT.
I started out where the author was. Well, roughly. +Kids, -Secondary edu. I could and did rise above that. And above 3 economy shifts that each reset my biz to zero.
I did not rise above my spouse being swapped for an adult with profound psych issues. I took on the single dad and caregiver roles well enough.
However, I could not overcome the daily sabotage of, well, everything. It's like a TV trope where you are shackled to your worst enemy. But you have to keep them safe and your loved ones safe from them.
It's tough to maintain a job schedule when the police frequently call you during the workday (w and w/o CPS). Or when your transpo is stolen and can't be replaced.
In short, it's particular tough to pretend to be stable. Eventually there are no bridges left to burn.
Some of these risks are hard to adjust for. I guess you've got to muster all the grit and keep walking.
Also BTW, you've shown enough but let me wish you more strength for you. All the very best!
This is much more common than people in their conditioned romanticism will ever acknowledge.
In the economy of the past 15 years, marriage is a much worse risk than an expensive education.
Might sound stupid, but this major life area being just a rock solid fundament frees up so much energy my peers still struggle with nowadays quite often it’s insane in hindsight. Everyday life costs are lower, some risk taking is possible when someone has your back unconditionally and even supports it (as long as not going reckless), and a secure home base to return to is something I guess even money can’t easily buy. Short of being born already rich I guess that’s a cheat code with similar small odds, and I appreciate it.
Then the „business opportunities“ become just something way more relaxed. Not identity level validation attempts or despair to get into a better life. Which again allows better judgement calls and reintroduces more fun and creativity into many things.
Just my 2c for perspective
> Zero drama, mutual respect and affection, both still preserving some independence to maintain a „self".
Just the income is from me alone which frees her up to have enough time for our kids.
Having such a long time and deep relationship is quite rare, I guess.
I'm now taking time out to try to figure out how to escape the confines of the career path I've taken to find something different.
Open to suggestions of entirely different careers that I could switch to that might have higher odds of not being toxic rat-races full of people telling lies and bullshit just to survive.
But broader experience suggests the world of work just sucks these days (and yes, it's these days - our parent's generation had a brief period of doing 9-to-5 jobs which paid well enough to afford homes, have families and social lives and holidays. We don't get that now.). No wonder large numbers of my generation are dropping out of the workforce...
I think this can be a useful maxim to get you to the next day, but in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life. We grow and change and need novelty. We are held in a web of interdependent, ever-shifting relationships - with people, businesses, material goods, ecology. I think that generally people are seeking connection in a broader sphere. To be held in community, to have multiple significant identities (mother/wife/boss), to live in richness and abundance where any one thing is not make or break.
We seem to view "reality" through different lenses. I've usually found "one" to be a magic number; as long as it's the "right one." That's the gist of what he's saying.
In my experience, needing more than one, often signals issues that need closer examination.
In my community, we have a joke: "An addict is someone that needs two One-A-Days."
There's a lot of initial investment and groundworks, then once you're well-integrated, the marginal returns get higher for the most established relationships.
Or we can realize we have some things to learn that we will learn no matter whether we pick the startup, or job to learn transferrable skills and also become better well rounded.