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I had a similar experience starting life with opportunity debt. Single parent family whose mother had no high school education. Have ADD and dyslexia, moved aro
by rdlecler1 11y ago
I had a similar experience starting life with opportunity debt. Single parent family whose mother had no high school education. Have ADD and dyslexia, moved around a lot with a good part my life in subsidized housing, and never graduated from high school. No one teaches you the basics, so that when you do start coming into your own and taking control of your own life you are so incredibly behind your peers socially, politically, and intellectually. I eventually went to community college as a mature student, eventually made my way to university, did a masters and then a PhD at Yale. Through it all I was always one or two steps behind and so many opportunities were missed because I didn't have money. Similarly, now as an entrepreneur I find myself being a little more conservative because you've been through a lot of bad times without a safety net.
- josephjrobison 11y agoThe main story, this comment, and many other user comments are really interesting and human. Would love to see someone compile a series of them, HONY style. These stories don't get talked about enough in the startup world.
- timewarrior 11y agoAgreed. Wrote my story below. Not sure how ranking works on hacker news, it towards the bottom. Wish someone compiles these.
- bloggerden 11y agoSorry for my ignorance but what's "HONY" style?
- marianoguerra 11y agoI think "Humans of New York" http://www.humansofnewyork.com/ http://www.humansofnewyork.com/
- josephjrobison 11y agoYes that's the one - pretty amazing stuff.
- um_ya 11y agoI feel like the majority of people make the mistake of reflecting on themselves and saying "if only I had this", or "if only I wasn't disadvantaged in this way"... In reality, everyone is disadvantaged in some way, and I can guarantee you that the successful people had a lot of disadvantages and setbacks. You shouldn't dwindle on what you don't have, but rather on what you do have. Successful people don't wait for the stars to align to do what they want. Safety and security is NEVER guaranteed, and if you want to be successful, you must understand this and risk it anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktlTxC4QG8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktlTxC4QG8g
- zasz 11y agoAre you seriously saying that everyone's disadvantages are the same? Wow.
- anovikov 11y agoEasily. If someone comes from a rich family it's in a way harder for him to build a startup: he will not belong to the demographic of 90%+ potential users of any startup, and it will be hard for him to understand what they want and how to pitch it to them, same thing about employees - it will be hard to lead and motivate people not understanding what the people who need to work to pay their bills feel. This is my personal experience, while i am not rich in the 'first world' sense, when i lived in a small provincial town in Russia 9 years ago i was rich in a relative sense - if you define rich as '1%'. My attempt to build a catering business failed miserably because of these items. Programming - where my clients are of same demographic as myself - works way better.
- akjetma 11y agoA rich person can throw money at this problem or at least has the financial and temporal capacity to research it and gain an academic understanding. I know the conventional wisdom is to build something that you would use yourself, but towards the later stages of most b2b companies--especially ones that deal with enterprise customers--the customer is just as alien to anyone as poor people are to you. This is such a tiny issue compared to being poor.
- jayess 11y agoBut of course your experiences and hardships shaped who you are as a person too.