Once you don't have to worry about not having to pay rent, not having to pay electricity etc then your appetite for risks grows. To get to that point you either need to start from a rich household (parents) or get to a certain age, have some money to support you (from previous work) and then go into entrepreneurial experiments. This is a big reason why you see older entrepreneurs embarking into that journey.
No, it's not an appetite for risk. It's that those risks get less risky.
People become more "risk tolerant" when those risks are less of a threat to them, their survival, their future, etc.
That's a little like saying "Rich people eat at more expensive restaurants than poor people because they have the appetite for it." No, they don't. They have the same appetite as a poor person. They just have more ability to pay for the better restaurant.
It depends what you are measuring as the risk. The risk of lowering your quality of life may decrease with wealth, but the risk of your business failing likely stays roughly the same. Thus, more appetite for risk.
E.g. Poor and rich alike are at risk of losing the capital they put into the business. For the rich that might be daddy's money, while for the poor that might be their life savings. Both are at risk of being unemployed and without healthcare. For the rich that might be fine, but for the poor that could be life-threatening.
You also don’t have the time to recover should the startup fail. Because of that I think rich parents holds much more influence than having built up a safety cushion (retirement fund) later in life. The risks are much much higher in that case.
Your need for success diminishes with wealth though. A lot of founders struggle to motivate themselves to push through the hard stuff, get over the pits of depression, and to drive themselves following mistakes and rejections if they have resources to fall back on. It's a lot easier to take a month off and book a nice vacation after you've been told "no" by an investor or a major customer than it is to keep going and fire up your IDE or pick up the phone to chase another sale.
Many of the founders I've met work crazy hard because they won't be able to pay the rent if they don't. They literally don't have a choice except to succeed. That's a hell of a motivator that wealthy people will never have.
As a poor kid who recently failed to get a startup off the ground, I'll second this. It may have been hard to pay rent, but I knew I could have a 200k base salary whenever I needed to give up. "Getting by" is just not something a reasonably talented engineer in the U.S. ever has to worry about, no matter their background.
> "Getting by" is just not something a reasonably talented engineer in the U.S. ever has to worry about, no matter their background.
Yes it is. Injuries & medical care/accessibility/costs can fuck you harder than you could ever imagine. Even when you may have been previously making mid-deep into 6 figures.
Motivation is nice, but building something new and novel requires skill and being on the edge of the right social/environmental phenomenon (timing).
The skill development part requires free time (to learn and practice) and access (to computers, tools, people, etc.)
If we're talking about creating just any kind of business, then sure hard work and determination are enough. If we're talking about outlier success stories in tech, then privilege is almost always a component of the story.
> Your need for success diminishes with wealth though
I'd consider that a feature, not a bug for the question of global stage level founding: the subset of rich parents offspring who goes after building something aims for building something actually big, not just for the first best thing that promises access to the world of fancy cars and being someone's boss.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with starting a business aimed at bootstrapping itself and funding a car, later a house and in the end maybe even a boat. I have much greater sympathy for those than for people aiming to be the next unicorn (that term hasn't really made the jump into this decade, or has it?). But when it does come to this scope, I'd take it for granted that the born rich run a considerably higher chance of not getting blinded by high numbers and not deluding themselves.
No. A smart person can always get a well paying job and still be considered successful by his peers or family.
The son of a wealthy family may think going to Google is the same as failure. He has the money to try over and over again and does so because working for someone else is like being a sheep.
You’re subtly implying that this smart person also has the resume to be allowed to be interviewed in the first place. (A common bias of thought by people working in tech, from my experience).
There are people out there whose problem is not that they aren’t smart, but that they don’t have the resume that is aligned with HR filters. Their two biggest and relatively substantial hurdles are: 1) not getting a chance for even a first interview because they are immediately being rejected purely based on their resume, and 2) having a weak position going into salary negotiations.
So, imho “a smart person can always get a well paying job” is a gross oversimplification often made by people who are not in such circumstances.
Agree with everything you said, but just want to add a couple additional hurdles to even being considered “smart”:
- going to a bad public school because you live in a poor area has ripple effects that may put you in a worse position than some private prep school kid
- if you grew up in poverty, your brain will literally grow differently due to chronic stress, environmental toxins, lack of stimulation, etc. [1].
We pretend like filtering for “smart” is fair, but the opportunity to be smart is heavily weighted by privilege.
Years ago, I saw a study that said that there is as much child neglect and drug abuse in rich neighborhoods as in ghettos. Good parents tend to be middle class because, yes, you need to be able to feed the kids adequately etc but you also need to actually spend time with the kids and care about them.
Cher once said "I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better."
Certainly, all other things being equal, it's generally better to have more resources. But life isn't quite that simple and sometimes the price involved in successfully pursuing money involves a human cost.
If you can have lots of money and also have time for the children and also are a decent person, etc, cool. Some people pull that off.
Depends on your definition of success. One's need of work to pay the bills might decrease with wealth. Yet one's mindset may change to not consider themselves successful until they attain some higher thing (like a big house, fancy cars, expensive vacations, etc).
These founders you're talking about, are they also choosing to live in expensive areas? If they change their definition of success, it's possible they could do different jobs or live in cheaper areas.
If they'd fail, they'd just have to do something else (less fun) to pay the rent. Perhaps moving to a cheaper housing. That's a negative prospect, but much less negative than getting evicted ('not able to afford rent'). And if you got rich parents, you can always live in a room (YOUR (large) room) in their house. Or have them buy you a house. Its a massive difference from the prospect of having to move to a cheaper, less likable neighborhood but neither is going to kill you.
I have a decent backstop and quite frankly I still have a relatively middle of the road risk tolerance. I've done one startup and quite frankly just grinding and doing stuff I like is starting to sound like a much better route as I'm entering my mid to late 20's. For me the bigger force pushing me away from startups was just the amount of stress / energy it takes relative to just working somewhere. To be frank, I think people with decent money and more importantly social energy / connections give you a leg up. Being able to afford living in a place / attend a university that lends itself to these kinds of connections is also incredibly relevant.
The notion of having roommates or not a few years of savings just isn't as cool or interesting as it once sounded. Granted, it feels weird to think about giving up on something I thought I wanted to do for a really long time, but that's just life sometimes.
This is my experience as well. I just stick with MathJax for this reason. Since I'm already very familiar with LaTeX proper (use it every single work day), it's far less jarring to just use MathJax.
The additional problem I see with Slack is that their calls/video chat option is really inadequate and almost everyone is opting for Zoom. Zoom + Slack is a very steep price point for a lot of companies, especially in an era of cost saving and insecurity about the future.
My company opted to move to MS Teams because the experience is better as it integrates calls + chats and we were already using office365 for emails and documents anyway, so it was "free". As someone said already, it's hard to compete with free.
I can't see Slack getting out of this in one piece. I see Amazon being the obvious choice here.
I'm not sure about finding a coach, but having a person that you respect to talk about your problem, issues or frustration with work is really important.
Whenever I've talked about something that bothered me with a very few people I respect, and look up to, I made better choices. I really recommend to everyone to find this person.
It sounds like it would be a big help if github offered unlimited read-only/bot accounts. Not sure how technically feasible is that but it doesn't sound impossible.
Or as someone mentioned above, if they went the Slack route of not charging for users who don't push/pull code in a 30/60 day period. That way you could still have collaborator users (issues, PRs, etc) and only pay for the users who actually code.
We've been using Gitlab with my team for the past year or so. Moved from corporate Github to it. It's really nice and almost flawless so far. When i tried to install it, at some point, to a VPS of mine i had several issues with ruby packages etc. I might give it another go, it seems like the latest versions have been improved significantly.
