To inherit a small fortune and just not lose it is admirable. Yet this person is mocking Bezos for turning a quite small fortune into one of the largest on the planet. As if it doesn't count if he didn't start from scratch. Privilege does not erase accomplishment.
>“this person is mocking Bezos for turning a quite small fortune into one of the largest on the planet”
No, he didn’t do that all. He’s just providing context about the early beginnings of Amazon that allowed Bezos to built this. Bezos deserves credit for what he built but let’s not act as if he came from the gutter.
Nobody is erasing anything. It's just merely noted that in order to make a billion dollars, it helps to start with a million dollars. Just common sense if you understand capitalism, but with some examples in this case.
If the amount of stress-relief that having a small cushion of a couple tens of thousands of dollars, (such as what I and people in my peer group would have had when we were getting started) scales up to having a million or more to start with then it definitely makes a huge difference.
The simple fact of knowing but there's a place to fall back on for a few weeks or a few months that isn't flipping burgers or scraping together money to get your car out of impound because it wouldn't start and you had to leave it on the street for a week to get it looked at. The ability to give yourself the liberty of taking time away from "producing stuff" to attend some social event or mixer where you might meet someone who could put you in touch with others who are interested in your idea, without having to cold call grind every single investment lead. The network that having this kind of money around brings to you. these are incalculable advantages that are often glossed over or dismissed when arguments about supposed envy and jealousy of others' mega-success come up.
And even more intangible but still very present in the mindset of people who are trying to get a startup off the ground at all, is that having family with this kind of money available, even if they don't give you a single cent of it, is likely to make you feel more comfortable about taking a risk because it's very likely that your family understands the upsides of taking a risk. Which is completely different from coming from a background where everyone close to you expects you to work an honest trade or profession for a regular paycheck, and with whom you have to rationalize your life choices - why didn't you just become a doctor or a lawyer, etc. - always on the defense about why you were doing what you're doing instead of getting even notional support from them instead.
Of course parents who are wealthy, well connected and highly educated are able to give huge advantages to their children, and that’s okay. It also makes things like Y-Combinator even more important, as it gives people with drive access to funding, connections, the right advise etc. I submitted this post because the word “self made” is stretched and overused to the point where people forget important context.
Yes, we should make parents investing in their children illegal.
At birth, children will hidden from the eyes of the parents and transferred to the community. The child will be part of the community and the community will provide for all equally. They will be rotated out on a weekly basis amongst couples to be raised and nurtured temporarily, so every child will have the closest possible exact same upbringing.
Those who grow tall too fast will have weights put on them, those who show intellectual aptitude will be given booze to slow their development.
Then one day a child escapes, runs through the corn fields to freedom, and immediately gets run over by a AI controlled John Deere harvester, for the children are fast, but the harvester is faster.
>Yes, we should make parents investing in their children illegal.
Agred, we should make the artificial boosting of prospects for some kids and handicapping of others based on their respective's parent's wealth illegal.
>Those who grow tall too fast will have weights put on them, those who show intellectual aptitude will be given booze to slow their development.
And those sliding on slippery slopes would have to wear high-friction fabrics to be made to slide slower.
Or perhaps natural talents and throwing money to boost some children's life prospects while others are left behind (from no quality or action of their own) are not the same thing.
I think maybe a reverse interpretation might be more charitable - like it's too bad that there are many people who don't have access to that investment and opportunity due to their birth.
Although my take is I disagree with both points - yes maybe connections and status may allow some people to be successful, and extreme poverty can hinder success. But on average I don't know how much that matters. I think someone like geohot could be successful without any network or without anyone's help. He has an attitude that's geared for curiousity and making a contribution
Maybe there are other factors besides just money. Like the fact that wealthy parents can afford invest more time into their kids, they have less financial stress so can focus more on parenting.
Also having a successful person literally raise you from birth would probably contain a lot of lessons about sucess
I think assertions like this miss alot because they automatically assume the wealthy parents helped them financially. It seems to feel of sort of idolizing of money, thinking money can solve most problems and achieve a great many things. I think that's a popular but flawed belief.
As someone who started a moderately successful business in the past, I don't think just having money to pour into a startup is as important or as deciding a factor as people think
I would argue that “investing in your kids” is a middle class point of view. If you’re upper middle class or upper class you have nannies and au pairs helping you raise your children. Your relationship with your children has much more of an air of convenience than a middle class family.
I feel like the tweet author is of the belief that there is no such thing as extraordinary ability, only extraordinary privilege, and that nothing can be done to change one's lot in life.
Miguel Bezos (Jeff Bezos's father) was a refugee from Cuba. Miguel came to the USA empty handed, got a scholarship to university, worked at Exxon for 32 years, invested in his son's (jeff bezos's) startup and became a billionaire because of that investment.
He said nothing of the sort, just that 245k sure helps when you're starting a business. Maybe his dad should have let him fail so he could have thought up a self-sustaining business from the get go.
Of course it helps. I just think it's overly reductive to reduce something extraordinary to a single investment. Many businesses receive much more investment and fail.
> In reality Bezos's mommy and daddy gave him $245,573 to stop Amazon from failing in 1995.
Actually, it is not that out of reach that a person who is a professional such as an engineer or a doctor or lawyer to have $250,000 to be able to give to an adult child.
And it is possible for a poor person to encourage their children to study and become a doctor or engineer (see for example the Asian immigrant communities).
Thus a person who comes to the US poor, could have a billionaire grandchild.
And no other country offers this kind of opportunity at scale the way America does which is why so many people from all over the world endeavor to come here.
>And it is possible for a poor person to encourage their children to study and become a doctor or engineer (see for example the Asian immigrant communities).
The Asian immigrant communities benefit from a much more stable environment than other immigrant or domestic communities have (and less systemic racism and exclusion). The same is not the case for the black or latino communities for example.
And even if the child of poor immigrant community (Asian or whatever) studies hard to become a doctor or engineer, they'd still have to do it under less opportunities, with less connections, more sacrifices, in worse school districts, with less access to tutors, with more stressful family environment (even less nutricion, more need to move, in more dangerous neighborhoods), etc than the child from a upper middle class or rich family. That's the injustice and lack of meritocracy.
>Well it wasn't always a case for the Asian community either yet somehow the Asian community thrives today.
That's because the Asian community has had the (stabler, more beneficial) conditions I've speak about for 3-4 decades at least -- it's not the time of the railroads of the WWII camps. Meanwhile, blacks and latinos still face those issues to this day.
Even so, even those Asians from poor backgrounds who do make it, have to work at it far harder than a middle class/rich kid. Equality is not just about a class of people (e.g. poor immigrants) getting the same outcomes. It's also not having to work harder and under more adverse conditions to get them.
(The injustice is the same to how to women had to be much better and work harder to "prove themselves" in order to get them same career outcomes as men).
The experiences for different Asian origins are different from my understanding; the experience of say Burmese or Lao immigrants is likely different from Chinese or Indian ones.
>how is living across the globe from your extended family leading to a more stable environment?
In that your real family is not looked down upon (not as much as a poor black family, they're even a "positive bias" for asians from whites), denied loans or opportunities in the same way, your community is not rife with drugs and violence, your school district is not as underfunded, cops don't just shoot you in the same rate, and so on.
>until recently, did asians not have to achieve higher scores than black/latino to get the same opportunities? how is this not exactly systemic racism?
It is. From all I've read, Asians faced racism, and suffered from ill-conceived programs to artificially boost other communities that excluded them, too. At least though they got a stabler environment, more acceptance, and more opportunities (see above) to achieve those higher scores than black/latino kids, even considering the "affirmitive action" and such (which only benefited a handful of black kids anyway).
Jeff Bezos' Dad is an example of a refugee to billionaire story. He came to the USA as a refugee and eventually became a billionaire by investing 245k in what would become Amazon.
[Changing my original comment, since I've been informed that snark is not cool on HN. My mistake.]
It's observably true that many high-profile founders and execs, especially in the US, come from well-off families.
What's the lesson to draw from this? IMHO even if "my parents never gave ME a cent" is true (as it is for me, btw), how do I help myself by dwelling on that?
We could increase taxes to provide better education and social services and increase opportunity for all (a la Finland), but is that a popular sentiment in the tech community?
The myth of the rags-to-riches, by-their-bootstraps entrepreneur is foundational to so much political philosophy in the US. It informs popular opinion on a wide range of public policy. Building a more accurate understanding of the nature of wealth and class mobility allows individuals to make more informed decisions both in their personal lives and at the ballot box.
