17 ms·

One of the privileges people don't often think about is being able to afford to fail. If you don't risk destitution after your startup fails, you can try and f

by kubb 4y ago

One of the privileges people don't often think about is being able to afford to fail. If you don't risk destitution after your startup fails, you can try and fail many times, learn and try again. It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die. One of the many reasons the rich get richer and the poor, well you know how it goes.

noduerme 4y ago
The average American watches 4 hours a day of TV. Most startup founders work other jobs while building their project - if they can afford to fail, it's because they have that other job. But they're spending those four hours (and many, many more) on labors of love. Sure, there are some trustfund kids who get to play founder and have the odds stacked in their favor, but that's neither the soul nor the joy of starting your own project. In my experience most of those types are miserable even in success.
- kubb 4y ago
  The TV numbers are surely skewed by retirees? Who built their billion dollar company while working a day job again?
  - Swizec 4y ago
    Jeff Bezos, for example. Amazon was well on its way to product market fit and full validation that its gonna work by the time he quit his dayjob. Same for Zuckerberg and school. You don’t hit a billion dollars while having a dayjob. You validate the idea and approach work and can get you there. Anthony Bourdain famously quit his job only when it had become absolutely impossible to keep alongside his public persona work because interviewers/journalists kept disrupting restaurant operations at his job.
  - pawelmurias 4y ago
    If you have a billion dollar company there are better sources of entertainment than binge watching tv. I would assume half literate serfs are watching the most tv.
- jen20 4y ago
  > if they can afford to fail, it's because they have that other job. Citation needed. I’m quite sure that working a second job does not go down well with VCs. In most cases the networking required and high risk of failure is only achievable through having well-off parents.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Citation: I started two failed startups while working day jobs... and could afford for them to fail because I had solid work, despite the thousands of hours I had invested in them over years. You can't really tell if something's possible if you begin by simply complaining it's impossible. Is the world rigged toward helping rich kids? Sure. But fools and their fortune are quickly separated. Using inequity as a basis for complaining and giving up before even trying is really the fastest road to bitterness... and it's not even a fair or knowledgeable take, since it doesn't come from true personal experience or personally failed attempts which are, if nothing else, highly educational.
pavlov 4y ago
This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail. Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and prefer to yammer endlessly about tax cuts instead of thinking about how the welfare foundation can help entrepreneurship. Fortunately there are some successful people who talk about this. For example in Finland the Supercell founders (gaming company with $10B exit) have been emphasizing the importance of the welfare structures for enabling entrepreneurship opportunities.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  My intuition is that effective entrepreneurs generally have a strong conviction that they won't fail, and in any case wouldn't want to fall back on taxpayers if they did. They will also disproportionately be averse to paying social democratic tax rates once they, in their mind, inevitably succeed.
  - Lutger 4y ago
    This doesn't strike me as something inherently part of entrepreneurship in a world-wide context, but rather something particular to anglo saxon countries, and especially Americans which are big on neoliberal ideology. Americans are also the most anti-government of any people I know. The Netherlands is split in this I think, but the entrepreneurs I know are nothing like this. They appreciate the safety net and often happily pax taxes, its more that they hate the labour involved. And everybody I speak to has acutely aware of the possibility of failure. Maybe its my circle though, there are also more radical libertarians in my country, but they are a rarity.
    - czbond 4y ago
      My view, from the U.S., is that most founders want to make it on their own and keep the returns close to the vest (aka "low taxes). The risks are too high to found a company for little payoff.... and most founders that exit already pay a significant tax on exits (even when they are structured to reduce tax). Entrepreneurship is too hard of a game to put up with the mental and work grinding for a decade for small returns. Everyone focuses on the "money" a founder may make (with heavy survivorship bias) - but don't focus on the high probability of losing years, or a decade, of lost revenue and social life if a company fails. HN is filled with want-trapreneurs who are mis-guided about the game they're entering.
melenaboija 4y ago
What I have seen from others (I have not been able to do so) knowing that you can afford to fail beforehand is one of the biggest factors to succeed: - Objectively is not an issue to fail and you know it - It gives you the security to take risky decisions and at the end it is a matter of expectation, bet and see if you win. To me this goes along with the mantra that failing is not bad and you have to do so few times before you succeed. Obviously, the more you try the more chances you have. If you are not a casualty.
- ComodoHacker 4y ago
  It also allows you not to give up on the last mile, when you still don't know it's the last mile.
safety1st 4y ago
Sure, the rich have more advantages than the poor. Always been that way and always will. In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness of this but the reality is that if you don't come from wealth and privilege, you need a different playbook. Dwelling on the inequity neuters you. If you want to win you need to figure out what the playbook is and then do the right things. I found a playbook that worked by reading all the self help and business books I could (preferably from the public library because that was free and I was poor). My playbook ended up being: move to a country with a lower cost of living, and get good enough at freelancing online that I essentially had a safety net and a long-term runway for other pursuits. I then tried a few different business models, each failed a bit less than the last until I hit a winner which bankrolls about a dozen people on my payroll. A rich guy wouldn't have had to go through all that but I don't care. It's totally irrelevant to the requirements for success in my reality. Which were build my own baseline from scratch and then fail until I succeeded. People born into easier paths than mine have sneered at many many elements of what I did over the years (living in a "shithole" country, working with a "shitty" tech stack, taking "shitty" Elance gigs that didn't pay enough, etc. etc.). Other people who were able to tolerate remaining victims of the system tuned out my story and focused on other things, like bitching about politics. I'm worth more than most of the people in both categories now and I feel like this is just the beginning. I haven't had children yet but if I do they will have fewer disadvantages than I did. There are different and easier playbooks than the one I used. If I was starting again I would probably go into a more conventionally profitable vocation and save for 15 years, studying business and coding on the side, and then start a business. But either way the point is your playbook if you start poor needs to be different. It's not as easy as the one the rich guys have but that fact is a distraction. You should be too busy figuring out your plan to care.
- jnovek 4y ago
  Class mobility is generally regarded as a good thing for economies. It increases competition. What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations. If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economically well.
Tycho 4y ago
This is why societies should strive for more “inequality” (as in, more families with large fortunes). The rich have a safety net that allows them to take risks that ultimately benefit all of society. Let’s say with the best execution, a startup still only has 10% chance of success - so then the only thing to do is have more and more people “roll the dice.” And no, a strong welfare state is not a substitute - the danger is not starvation, but loss of your life savings or comfortable lifestyle provided by a decent career. Welfare does nothing to mitigate that risk (except maybe for the people with no wealth or good employment prospects, but they are probably not the primary talent pool for startup founders).
- Sammi 4y ago
  You really don't think there is already more than enough inequality? I get the case for some capital accumulation. Capital does make for an amazing economic engine that we all benefit from. Capitalist countries are richer than non capitalist countries. Easy to understand. But there is a point where more capital accumulation and inequality just makes the rest of us become serfs to oligarchs.
  - Tycho 4y ago
    I think we need more Elon Musks, yes. Although, obviously, we don’t want more people who got rich by being politicians.
    - FpUser 4y ago
      I have a suspicion that if Elon Musk types were given free reign we would end up with people working overtime for pennies.
    - bandyaboot 4y ago
      Funny, I’d cite Elon Musk level capital accumulation and his decisions on how to allocate his capital over the last year as a perfect case study of the theory that, while capital accumulation can be a good thing, we also don’t want all our eggs in too few baskets.
jamesbfb 4y ago
> It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die. I’m stealing this. Fantastic analogy.
brightball 4y ago
When my wife started her business, we lived on my income for 5 years while she continually reinvested in growing it. It was hard but worth it.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Congratulations (I mean it. No /s). I understand that to mean that your income was enough to keep (at least) both of you fed, housed and clothed. Maybe you also had some savings/family support to use as a Kickstarter for her business and possibly to help pay the bills but maybe you didn't. If both of you had to work 40+ hours a week and there is still too much month left at the end of the money, it's really hard to afford so much as a car repair not to speak of starting a business. Is it possible to be an entrepreneur in that case? Yes but it's an enormous gamble and needs for all the stars to align just right. The consequences of failure are immediate (there are no 5 years to get started) and dire (homelessness/ no ability to get to work). It's a much worse bet than for someone from the middle class who might have to move in with their parents again. Not pleasant but endurable. Someone well off suffers not even that and is, at worst, a little bit embarrassed in front of their family. They can also try again and again.
  - brightball 4y ago
    Yea. I was a programmer working for a stable telecom company at the time. We didn't have kids yet and lived in a low cost of living area where it was possible to live off of my income. It wasn't a huge sum of money by any stretch, but it was enough while we limited expenses. There were a lot of trials. We were close to having to file for bankruptcy 6 different times during a particularly difficult 2 year stretch. Our exit plan was always that she just go back to work with the potential to have to sell our house to pay of debts or lease agreements. Starting a business is hard with a lot of risks and that's before you actually hire staff. The moment that you have to consistently make payroll on time, your stress level goes through the roof with the combination of obligation to financial consistency and the knowledge that you are responsible for other people (and their families in many cases).
    - 4y ago
osrec 4y ago
The yard sale model encapsulates a lot of what you said above. This interactive website does a good job of explaining the model itself: https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/ https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
lowercased 4y ago
I had a friend/colleague build a successful startup. I didn't know him on day one of his startup, but I knew him from very early on. He had some initial customers, and was making progress, but slow. Early on, through connections, he landed a remote contracting gig that paid a full 40 hours/week, but usually didn't consume more than 10-15 hours of his time per week, and that went down over time. It was supporting a legacy system, so there wasn't a whole lot of new dev/work, but it was seasonally important, and had to be up/maintained/etc. That was, IIRC, something like $60/hr. So, early on in his startup, he ended up having a 'side gig' that was paying $100k/year, but only taking up ~12 hrs/week most of the time. That left plenty of time to focus on building out things the initial handful of customers wanted. It also gave him a lot of time to just... grow slow. Ended up getting to .... $30k/month in recurring revenue while employing just a couple of folks (part time, IIRC), and... then one of his larger competitors decided to close up. He had a few months of non-stop working building data migration tools to convert competitors to his platform. But that took him to another level. Getting a remote consulting gig paying guaranteed base while not consuming much time was very... lucky. He didn't look for it, but knew it was a good deal when it arrived, and he jumped at it. This was crucial to the 'afford to fail' part referenced above (apologies for the long post here - that was the trigger phrase). That second part was very 'luck' based as well, but he was prepared to capitalize on that luck. This was years in to the journey, and the startup was already comfortable with respect to revenue/profit/etc. But... he built that over years, very slowly. No amount of 100 hour weeks could have landed him any of the competitors' clients early on, because he wasn't known. During that build, he could 'afford to fail' because of that remote contract. And now... he can try new things and afford to fail for the rest of his life (assuming the gamble isn't too big!) A lot of word of mouth, a lot of slow growth, a lot of initial luck, a lot of patience. It worked out for him over about ... 8-9 years, but any of those pieces missing early on would have resulted in much lower growth, or stalling, or he might have given up and moved to something else.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  When people see "luck" they often miss "set up to capitalize on getting lucky." That is the component of skill (and background) in most entrepreneurial success stores. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and most other mega-entrepreneurs were very good at exploiting their lucky circumstances. People who don't notice this think it's all luck because they wouldn't be where they were without the luck - they notice that the luck was necessary. They don't notice that the luck wasn't sufficient. Lottery winners are a great example of the insufficiency of luck to create wealth.
glangenderfer 4y ago
my living expenses in cancun were $700/month. How bad do you want it?
mzs 4y ago
… If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss: … If—; Kipling, Rudyard; 1910
ryandrake 4y ago
It’s like a baseball game. Most people have no at-bats. They are stuck on the bench. They have no capital and no way to build up enough capital to try a business. Some people have one at-bat. They save some capital, take their swing, and maybe get a base hit, maybe strike out. If they are lucky, they hit a home run and end up set for life. The rich get an infinite number of at-bats. They can just swing and swing until they hit their home run, then swing again. Then they write books about how hard work and hustling can make anyone a millionaire.

by kubb 4y ago

noduerme 4y ago

The average American watches 4 hours a day of TV. Most startup founders work other jobs while building their project - if they can afford to fail, it's because they have that other job. But they're spending those four hours (and many, many more) on labors of love. Sure, there are some trustfund kids who get to play founder and have the odds stacked in their favor, but that's neither the soul nor the joy of starting your own project. In my experience most of those types are miserable even in success.

kubb 4y ago
The TV numbers are surely skewed by retirees? Who built their billion dollar company while working a day job again?
- Swizec 4y ago
  Jeff Bezos, for example. Amazon was well on its way to product market fit and full validation that its gonna work by the time he quit his dayjob. Same for Zuckerberg and school. You don’t hit a billion dollars while having a dayjob. You validate the idea and approach work and can get you there. Anthony Bourdain famously quit his job only when it had become absolutely impossible to keep alongside his public persona work because interviewers/journalists kept disrupting restaurant operations at his job.
- pawelmurias 4y ago
  If you have a billion dollar company there are better sources of entertainment than binge watching tv. I would assume half literate serfs are watching the most tv.
jen20 4y ago
> if they can afford to fail, it's because they have that other job. Citation needed. I’m quite sure that working a second job does not go down well with VCs. In most cases the networking required and high risk of failure is only achievable through having well-off parents.
- noduerme 4y ago
  Citation: I started two failed startups while working day jobs... and could afford for them to fail because I had solid work, despite the thousands of hours I had invested in them over years. You can't really tell if something's possible if you begin by simply complaining it's impossible. Is the world rigged toward helping rich kids? Sure. But fools and their fortune are quickly separated. Using inequity as a basis for complaining and giving up before even trying is really the fastest road to bitterness... and it's not even a fair or knowledgeable take, since it doesn't come from true personal experience or personally failed attempts which are, if nothing else, highly educational.

pavlov 4y ago

This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail. Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and prefer to yammer endlessly about tax cuts instead of thinking about how the welfare foundation can help entrepreneurship. Fortunately there are some successful people who talk about this. For example in Finland the Supercell founders (gaming company with $10B exit) have been emphasizing the importance of the welfare structures for enabling entrepreneurship opportunities.

ETH_start 4y ago
My intuition is that effective entrepreneurs generally have a strong conviction that they won't fail, and in any case wouldn't want to fall back on taxpayers if they did. They will also disproportionately be averse to paying social democratic tax rates once they, in their mind, inevitably succeed.
- Lutger 4y ago
  This doesn't strike me as something inherently part of entrepreneurship in a world-wide context, but rather something particular to anglo saxon countries, and especially Americans which are big on neoliberal ideology. Americans are also the most anti-government of any people I know. The Netherlands is split in this I think, but the entrepreneurs I know are nothing like this. They appreciate the safety net and often happily pax taxes, its more that they hate the labour involved. And everybody I speak to has acutely aware of the possibility of failure. Maybe its my circle though, there are also more radical libertarians in my country, but they are a rarity.
  - czbond 4y ago
    My view, from the U.S., is that most founders want to make it on their own and keep the returns close to the vest (aka "low taxes). The risks are too high to found a company for little payoff.... and most founders that exit already pay a significant tax on exits (even when they are structured to reduce tax). Entrepreneurship is too hard of a game to put up with the mental and work grinding for a decade for small returns. Everyone focuses on the "money" a founder may make (with heavy survivorship bias) - but don't focus on the high probability of losing years, or a decade, of lost revenue and social life if a company fails. HN is filled with want-trapreneurs who are mis-guided about the game they're entering.

melenaboija 4y ago

What I have seen from others (I have not been able to do so) knowing that you can afford to fail beforehand is one of the biggest factors to succeed: - Objectively is not an issue to fail and you know it - It gives you the security to take risky decisions and at the end it is a matter of expectation, bet and see if you win. To me this goes along with the mantra that failing is not bad and you have to do so few times before you succeed. Obviously, the more you try the more chances you have. If you are not a casualty.

ComodoHacker 4y ago
It also allows you not to give up on the last mile, when you still don't know it's the last mile.

safety1st 4y ago

Sure, the rich have more advantages than the poor. Always been that way and always will. In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness of this but the reality is that if you don't come from wealth and privilege, you need a different playbook. Dwelling on the inequity neuters you. If you want to win you need to figure out what the playbook is and then do the right things. I found a playbook that worked by reading all the self help and business books I could (preferably from the public library because that was free and I was poor). My playbook ended up being: move to a country with a lower cost of living, and get good enough at freelancing online that I essentially had a safety net and a long-term runway for other pursuits. I then tried a few different business models, each failed a bit less than the last until I hit a winner which bankrolls about a dozen people on my payroll. A rich guy wouldn't have had to go through all that but I don't care. It's totally irrelevant to the requirements for success in my reality. Which were build my own baseline from scratch and then fail until I succeeded. People born into easier paths than mine have sneered at many many elements of what I did over the years (living in a "shithole" country, working with a "shitty" tech stack, taking "shitty" Elance gigs that didn't pay enough, etc. etc.). Other people who were able to tolerate remaining victims of the system tuned out my story and focused on other things, like bitching about politics. I'm worth more than most of the people in both categories now and I feel like this is just the beginning. I haven't had children yet but if I do they will have fewer disadvantages than I did. There are different and easier playbooks than the one I used. If I was starting again I would probably go into a more conventionally profitable vocation and save for 15 years, studying business and coding on the side, and then start a business. But either way the point is your playbook if you start poor needs to be different. It's not as easy as the one the rich guys have but that fact is a distraction. You should be too busy figuring out your plan to care.

jnovek 4y ago
Class mobility is generally regarded as a good thing for economies. It increases competition. What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations. If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economically well.

Tycho 4y ago

This is why societies should strive for more “inequality” (as in, more families with large fortunes). The rich have a safety net that allows them to take risks that ultimately benefit all of society. Let’s say with the best execution, a startup still only has 10% chance of success - so then the only thing to do is have more and more people “roll the dice.” And no, a strong welfare state is not a substitute - the danger is not starvation, but loss of your life savings or comfortable lifestyle provided by a decent career. Welfare does nothing to mitigate that risk (except maybe for the people with no wealth or good employment prospects, but they are probably not the primary talent pool for startup founders).

Sammi 4y ago
You really don't think there is already more than enough inequality? I get the case for some capital accumulation. Capital does make for an amazing economic engine that we all benefit from. Capitalist countries are richer than non capitalist countries. Easy to understand. But there is a point where more capital accumulation and inequality just makes the rest of us become serfs to oligarchs.
- Tycho 4y ago
  I think we need more Elon Musks, yes. Although, obviously, we don’t want more people who got rich by being politicians.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    I have a suspicion that if Elon Musk types were given free reign we would end up with people working overtime for pennies.
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    Funny, I’d cite Elon Musk level capital accumulation and his decisions on how to allocate his capital over the last year as a perfect case study of the theory that, while capital accumulation can be a good thing, we also don’t want all our eggs in too few baskets.

jamesbfb 4y ago

> It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die. I’m stealing this. Fantastic analogy.

brightball 4y ago

When my wife started her business, we lived on my income for 5 years while she continually reinvested in growing it. It was hard but worth it.

arlcode 4y ago
Congratulations (I mean it. No /s). I understand that to mean that your income was enough to keep (at least) both of you fed, housed and clothed. Maybe you also had some savings/family support to use as a Kickstarter for her business and possibly to help pay the bills but maybe you didn't. If both of you had to work 40+ hours a week and there is still too much month left at the end of the money, it's really hard to afford so much as a car repair not to speak of starting a business. Is it possible to be an entrepreneur in that case? Yes but it's an enormous gamble and needs for all the stars to align just right. The consequences of failure are immediate (there are no 5 years to get started) and dire (homelessness/ no ability to get to work). It's a much worse bet than for someone from the middle class who might have to move in with their parents again. Not pleasant but endurable. Someone well off suffers not even that and is, at worst, a little bit embarrassed in front of their family. They can also try again and again.
- brightball 4y ago
  Yea. I was a programmer working for a stable telecom company at the time. We didn't have kids yet and lived in a low cost of living area where it was possible to live off of my income. It wasn't a huge sum of money by any stretch, but it was enough while we limited expenses. There were a lot of trials. We were close to having to file for bankruptcy 6 different times during a particularly difficult 2 year stretch. Our exit plan was always that she just go back to work with the potential to have to sell our house to pay of debts or lease agreements. Starting a business is hard with a lot of risks and that's before you actually hire staff. The moment that you have to consistently make payroll on time, your stress level goes through the roof with the combination of obligation to financial consistency and the knowledge that you are responsible for other people (and their families in many cases).
  - 4y ago

osrec 4y ago

The yard sale model encapsulates a lot of what you said above. This interactive website does a good job of explaining the model itself: https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/ https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/

lowercased 4y ago

I had a friend/colleague build a successful startup. I didn't know him on day one of his startup, but I knew him from very early on. He had some initial customers, and was making progress, but slow. Early on, through connections, he landed a remote contracting gig that paid a full 40 hours/week, but usually didn't consume more than 10-15 hours of his time per week, and that went down over time. It was supporting a legacy system, so there wasn't a whole lot of new dev/work, but it was seasonally important, and had to be up/maintained/etc. That was, IIRC, something like $60/hr. So, early on in his startup, he ended up having a 'side gig' that was paying $100k/year, but only taking up ~12 hrs/week most of the time. That left plenty of time to focus on building out things the initial handful of customers wanted. It also gave him a lot of time to just... grow slow. Ended up getting to .... $30k/month in recurring revenue while employing just a couple of folks (part time, IIRC), and... then one of his larger competitors decided to close up. He had a few months of non-stop working building data migration tools to convert competitors to his platform. But that took him to another level. Getting a remote consulting gig paying guaranteed base while not consuming much time was very... lucky. He didn't look for it, but knew it was a good deal when it arrived, and he jumped at it. This was crucial to the 'afford to fail' part referenced above (apologies for the long post here - that was the trigger phrase). That second part was very 'luck' based as well, but he was prepared to capitalize on that luck. This was years in to the journey, and the startup was already comfortable with respect to revenue/profit/etc. But... he built that over years, very slowly. No amount of 100 hour weeks could have landed him any of the competitors' clients early on, because he wasn't known. During that build, he could 'afford to fail' because of that remote contract. And now... he can try new things and afford to fail for the rest of his life (assuming the gamble isn't too big!) A lot of word of mouth, a lot of slow growth, a lot of initial luck, a lot of patience. It worked out for him over about ... 8-9 years, but any of those pieces missing early on would have resulted in much lower growth, or stalling, or he might have given up and moved to something else.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
When people see "luck" they often miss "set up to capitalize on getting lucky." That is the component of skill (and background) in most entrepreneurial success stores. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and most other mega-entrepreneurs were very good at exploiting their lucky circumstances. People who don't notice this think it's all luck because they wouldn't be where they were without the luck - they notice that the luck was necessary. They don't notice that the luck wasn't sufficient. Lottery winners are a great example of the insufficiency of luck to create wealth.

glangenderfer 4y ago

my living expenses in cancun were $700/month. How bad do you want it?

mzs 4y ago

… If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss: … If—; Kipling, Rudyard; 1910

ryandrake 4y ago

It’s like a baseball game. Most people have no at-bats. They are stuck on the bench. They have no capital and no way to build up enough capital to try a business. Some people have one at-bat. They save some capital, take their swing, and maybe get a base hit, maybe strike out. If they are lucky, they hit a home run and end up set for life. The rich get an infinite number of at-bats. They can just swing and swing until they hit their home run, then swing again. Then they write books about how hard work and hustling can make anyone a millionaire.