5 ms·

I've never understood the drive to own my own business. My parents were both entrepreneurs and it always felt so tenuous and stressful compared to other jobs.

I've never understood the drive to own my own business. My parents were both entrepreneurs and it always felt so tenuous and stressful compared to other jobs. What percentage of small businesses actually end up making you more money than a traditional job? If my parents had worked at Walmart with their business degrees, they would probably be making way more $$ at a much more stable company than if they had run businesses. Of course, I say this as a person who has been very fortunate to decide on the right degree and career at the right time ( Software Engineer ), and has always been in enough demand to hold a well paying, steady job. My significant other has a less fun job. She works as a DBA at a museum. Every day I hear a new horror of being tech in a non-tech place. You don't realize how essential agile is until you see what it is trying to solve. [0] - 0: In my opinion, agile is about forcing stakeholders & product to commit to plans and communicate with tech in a timely manner, in order to avoid blame shifting.

datavirtue 5y ago
Your comment reminds me of all those imigrant entrepreneurs who run a business for a generation that pays for their children's college so they never have to get stuck running their own business.
Consultant32452 5y ago
Just my personal anecdote. I find it much less tenuous and stressful compared to most jobs. The key may be that I'm doing consulting and not trying to market a product. Day to day I'm not really a part of the team. If the project ultimately fails I don't have to deal with the aftermath, or the project has already failed by the time I'm brought in and I'm just cleaning up a mess. Regardless, it's not really my neck on the line. It's ultimately the company's fault and I will do my level best to help them, but that's the end of it. Switching to consulting REALLY helped my mental health in this way: If the company makes a bad decision, I don't care anymore. I feel like many (most) employees feel a lot of negative emotion when they believe management is making a bad decision. That's totally gone now. Regarding tenuous, I feel like I have much more job security compared to a regular employee. More people want my time than I have time. So if one of them bails on me, I just go down the list of relationships. In effect, I have multiple "employers." Worst case scenario I just get a regular job somewhere for a few years. If you're a person who doesn't interview well or is otherwise not confident in your ability to go back to a regular job easily I can see why this would be stressful.
jmstfv 5y ago
For me, it's mostly about independence. Living my life on my terms, on my own time, and on my own agenda is priceless. I don't have to ask anyone for permission to go for a walk or have a 3-hour long lunch if I want to. I can slack as much as I want as long as I keep the lights on. Oh, and I passionately hate alarms. Don't want to wake up every morning just because someone decided for me that I have to be somewhere. Sidenote: Good decision-making matters a lot. You can work for thousands of hours without having anything to show for it, or you can work for an hour and make more money than you've ever made in your entire life. Scary but exciting. See Taleb's Mediocristan vs Extremistan: https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
- iLoveOncall 5y ago
  > I don't have to ask anyone for permission to go for a walk or have a 3-hour long lunch if I want to. Me neither and I work at a FAANG. I think a lot of those serial entrepreneurs that have never worked in companies have a very skewed idea of what it actually looks like once you're in a decent company.
  - jmstfv 5y ago
    Most companies aren't decent, far from it. And I doubt most people have a fair chance of landing one of those decent jobs. Even putting all that aside, working for someone entails doing what you're told even if you don't want or agree with it. That's not how I want to spend my waking hours.
    - iLoveOncall 5y ago
      So you're telling me that if your customer wants the button in blue and you want it in yellow, you won't put it in blue? Being your own boss is a construction of the mind. If someone else is giving you money, they are your boss.
      - jmstfv 5y ago
WJW 5y ago
As the saying goes, "Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week." It depends on what motivates you I suppose, some people don't mind working all the time as long as they get a feeling of ownership. It's also easy to look at the richest people alive, notice that they're all entrepreneurs and then conclude that starting a company is the path to riches. This suffers from massive survivorship bias of course, but humans are how they are.
majani 5y ago
There are personality types that don't mind the extra risk and also personality types that put high value on being at the top of a hierarchy
kbenson 5y ago
Both my parents are entrepreneurs as well. My father a couple times over. My older brother also set out that way, and had a couple businesses, and I actually worked for his IT company for a few years, until he shut it down (and he now works for at tech company in SF). There was always the idea that being my own boss would be cool, but also a lot of angst about what if I succeed and have to deal with the stress of not knowing how things will be month to month if it's not a breakout success? Most businesses I've seen are not startups that get huge investments. They're small businesses where people struggle much the time, even if they have comfortable stretches. Eventually I settled on what I would want for any business of my own, which would be a side business or lifestyle business to supplement or maybe supplant my day job. I mostly stopped pursuing that, but am always open to the idea. Through introspection I've realized that were I even to somehow have become the founder of some startup, I probably would have wanted to exit with money ASAP as it grew, because that level of instability is just not what I'm looking for, and not what I think I should be subjecting my family to. Now, I'm fairly happy with a good job and more free time. I don't necessarily regret all of my attempts at side businesses, but I also feel like I missed more of the youth of some of my children than I should have. That doesn't feel like it was the right trade to make, and that's without even missing a huge amount. That's just not something you can get back, so it doesn't take too many nights a week of being absent for a couple years to add up. But there's freedom in dropping expectations for yourself to be doing more, and trying to make it for yourself. There's a reason people lament the loss of the middle class factory jobs of the last century, there's immense freedom in leaving work at work and having that provide enough money to live somewhat comfortably. There's no shame in that, nor in letting go of dreams of making it big yourself, if you decide that you're happier doing something else.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Some of us just hate having bosses. Being subject to someone's whims is such a repulsive feeling for me that I will go to great lengths to avoid it. I actually even hate having dominant customers. My ideal model of business is a ton of smaller customers, with none of them having more than 10 per cent share of the total revenue. Also, finding more ways to grow your business is rewarding - both psychologically and financially. I like "hacking" the question of "how can I introduce product X to more people who might be interested in buying it?"
- mst 5y ago
  The big difference between consulting and in-company roles for me is that if I have to deal with a stakeholder being foolish I'm aware they're gitting billed directly for the time I'm spending dealing with it. This isn't connected to how much -I- make each month either, it's a primarily psychological difference. Agree absolutely that ending up with a dominant customer can make you effectively in-company in terms of your incentives, though, and isn't the experience I want out of my work.
- binarysolo 5y ago
  Spoiler alert: as a small business owner, you're EVERYONE'S b_tch. Your customers, your employees, your critics... Being mindful of what everyone cares and distilling the actual value delivered is both skill and constant practice.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    It probably depends on the business. I don't feel like everyone's you-know-what, pretty much the opposite. It gave me lot of freedom to send somebody to hell if they start behaving obnoxiously. Not that it happens much. Even customers are more respectful if they feel that you aren't too dependent on them.
serjester 5y ago
I think for some people working for someone else is akin to selling off a piece of your soul daily. It's not about the money - it's about having autonomy, excitement and risk in your career. Money is just the scorecard. As an entrepreneur you get to hand pick who you work with, what you work on and how you get it done - something basically impossible working for someone else. If you think about it, in no other time in history has it been normal to work in distributed, mega corporations. This path definitely isn't for everyone and there's a lot of real downsides. Personally I grew up telling my Soviet parents that I want to be an entrepreneur - and them telling I need to choose a "real" job. Well after trying the "real job" thing, I vowed to stay as far as I could from corporate life and couldn't be happier. I guess it's just a matter of taste.
- honkycat 5y ago
  > As an entrepreneur you get to hand pick who you work with, what you work on and how you get it done - something basically impossible working for someone else. If you think about it, in no other time in history has it been normal to work in distributed, mega corporations. You do? I've owned my own consulting firm before. We took the clients we could get, and not all of them were our first choice. But we needed portfolio work and money to keep the lights on. Good clients are worth their weight in GOLD, and are comparatively rare to the "Oh hmm... I thought I was buying a website from you? I have to do stuff?" clients we would constantly see

datavirtue 5y ago

Your comment reminds me of all those imigrant entrepreneurs who run a business for a generation that pays for their children's college so they never have to get stuck running their own business.

Consultant32452 5y ago

Just my personal anecdote. I find it much less tenuous and stressful compared to most jobs. The key may be that I'm doing consulting and not trying to market a product. Day to day I'm not really a part of the team. If the project ultimately fails I don't have to deal with the aftermath, or the project has already failed by the time I'm brought in and I'm just cleaning up a mess. Regardless, it's not really my neck on the line. It's ultimately the company's fault and I will do my level best to help them, but that's the end of it. Switching to consulting REALLY helped my mental health in this way: If the company makes a bad decision, I don't care anymore. I feel like many (most) employees feel a lot of negative emotion when they believe management is making a bad decision. That's totally gone now. Regarding tenuous, I feel like I have much more job security compared to a regular employee. More people want my time than I have time. So if one of them bails on me, I just go down the list of relationships. In effect, I have multiple "employers." Worst case scenario I just get a regular job somewhere for a few years. If you're a person who doesn't interview well or is otherwise not confident in your ability to go back to a regular job easily I can see why this would be stressful.

jmstfv 5y ago

For me, it's mostly about independence. Living my life on my terms, on my own time, and on my own agenda is priceless. I don't have to ask anyone for permission to go for a walk or have a 3-hour long lunch if I want to. I can slack as much as I want as long as I keep the lights on. Oh, and I passionately hate alarms. Don't want to wake up every morning just because someone decided for me that I have to be somewhere. Sidenote: Good decision-making matters a lot. You can work for thousands of hours without having anything to show for it, or you can work for an hour and make more money than you've ever made in your entire life. Scary but exciting. See Taleb's Mediocristan vs Extremistan: https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

iLoveOncall 5y ago
> I don't have to ask anyone for permission to go for a walk or have a 3-hour long lunch if I want to. Me neither and I work at a FAANG. I think a lot of those serial entrepreneurs that have never worked in companies have a very skewed idea of what it actually looks like once you're in a decent company.
- jmstfv 5y ago
  Most companies aren't decent, far from it. And I doubt most people have a fair chance of landing one of those decent jobs. Even putting all that aside, working for someone entails doing what you're told even if you don't want or agree with it. That's not how I want to spend my waking hours.
  - iLoveOncall 5y ago
    So you're telling me that if your customer wants the button in blue and you want it in yellow, you won't put it in blue? Being your own boss is a construction of the mind. If someone else is giving you money, they are your boss.
    - jmstfv 5y ago

WJW 5y ago

As the saying goes, "Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week." It depends on what motivates you I suppose, some people don't mind working all the time as long as they get a feeling of ownership. It's also easy to look at the richest people alive, notice that they're all entrepreneurs and then conclude that starting a company is the path to riches. This suffers from massive survivorship bias of course, but humans are how they are.

majani 5y ago

There are personality types that don't mind the extra risk and also personality types that put high value on being at the top of a hierarchy

kbenson 5y ago

Both my parents are entrepreneurs as well. My father a couple times over. My older brother also set out that way, and had a couple businesses, and I actually worked for his IT company for a few years, until he shut it down (and he now works for at tech company in SF). There was always the idea that being my own boss would be cool, but also a lot of angst about what if I succeed and have to deal with the stress of not knowing how things will be month to month if it's not a breakout success? Most businesses I've seen are not startups that get huge investments. They're small businesses where people struggle much the time, even if they have comfortable stretches. Eventually I settled on what I would want for any business of my own, which would be a side business or lifestyle business to supplement or maybe supplant my day job. I mostly stopped pursuing that, but am always open to the idea. Through introspection I've realized that were I even to somehow have become the founder of some startup, I probably would have wanted to exit with money ASAP as it grew, because that level of instability is just not what I'm looking for, and not what I think I should be subjecting my family to. Now, I'm fairly happy with a good job and more free time. I don't necessarily regret all of my attempts at side businesses, but I also feel like I missed more of the youth of some of my children than I should have. That doesn't feel like it was the right trade to make, and that's without even missing a huge amount. That's just not something you can get back, so it doesn't take too many nights a week of being absent for a couple years to add up. But there's freedom in dropping expectations for yourself to be doing more, and trying to make it for yourself. There's a reason people lament the loss of the middle class factory jobs of the last century, there's immense freedom in leaving work at work and having that provide enough money to live somewhat comfortably. There's no shame in that, nor in letting go of dreams of making it big yourself, if you decide that you're happier doing something else.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Some of us just hate having bosses. Being subject to someone's whims is such a repulsive feeling for me that I will go to great lengths to avoid it. I actually even hate having dominant customers. My ideal model of business is a ton of smaller customers, with none of them having more than 10 per cent share of the total revenue. Also, finding more ways to grow your business is rewarding - both psychologically and financially. I like "hacking" the question of "how can I introduce product X to more people who might be interested in buying it?"

mst 5y ago
The big difference between consulting and in-company roles for me is that if I have to deal with a stakeholder being foolish I'm aware they're gitting billed directly for the time I'm spending dealing with it. This isn't connected to how much -I- make each month either, it's a primarily psychological difference. Agree absolutely that ending up with a dominant customer can make you effectively in-company in terms of your incentives, though, and isn't the experience I want out of my work.
binarysolo 5y ago
Spoiler alert: as a small business owner, you're EVERYONE'S b_tch. Your customers, your employees, your critics... Being mindful of what everyone cares and distilling the actual value delivered is both skill and constant practice.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  It probably depends on the business. I don't feel like everyone's you-know-what, pretty much the opposite. It gave me lot of freedom to send somebody to hell if they start behaving obnoxiously. Not that it happens much. Even customers are more respectful if they feel that you aren't too dependent on them.

serjester 5y ago

I think for some people working for someone else is akin to selling off a piece of your soul daily. It's not about the money - it's about having autonomy, excitement and risk in your career. Money is just the scorecard. As an entrepreneur you get to hand pick who you work with, what you work on and how you get it done - something basically impossible working for someone else. If you think about it, in no other time in history has it been normal to work in distributed, mega corporations. This path definitely isn't for everyone and there's a lot of real downsides. Personally I grew up telling my Soviet parents that I want to be an entrepreneur - and them telling I need to choose a "real" job. Well after trying the "real job" thing, I vowed to stay as far as I could from corporate life and couldn't be happier. I guess it's just a matter of taste.

honkycat 5y ago
> As an entrepreneur you get to hand pick who you work with, what you work on and how you get it done - something basically impossible working for someone else. If you think about it, in no other time in history has it been normal to work in distributed, mega corporations. You do? I've owned my own consulting firm before. We took the clients we could get, and not all of them were our first choice. But we needed portfolio work and money to keep the lights on. Good clients are worth their weight in GOLD, and are comparatively rare to the "Oh hmm... I thought I was buying a website from you? I have to do stuff?" clients we would constantly see