> I believe student loans can be written off after 25 years. Not sure the exact details. I know med school loans can be paid off based on income and if your inc

> I believe student loans can be written off after 25 years. Not sure the exact details. I know med school loans can be paid off based on income and if your income is low enough (almost never happens) you don't have to pay anything. I would frankly rather not have had 25 years of a ticking debt hanging over my head. I'd be almost 50. Maybe some people can see that far into the future and are comfortable with it, but I judged it an unacceptable risk. Re the economies of scale, I don't think you're wrong per se, but third order effects have a lot of contributing causes. > Also, I believe their definition of startup is not what most people on HN think of when it comes to startups. It just means newly formed businesses, the vast majority of which are small, non-VC funded businesses. Ah, the ones where you submit a business plan and get a bank loan that you have to pay back. ;-) IMO, that's riskier than VC work; you walk away with a fat pile of debt if the biz fails before a fully formed corporate veil is established. Recall that sole owners don't have veils, as they personally sign for the debt; after a certain point of size that doesn't happen. The ability of the median person to survive if their venture explodes is, to me, the critical point in founding a venture. There's probably a very useful economic history of small biz/startup failure for the past 200 years. I wonder if it's been written yet!