7 ms·

I feel like this could describe a lot of the culture around startups, too: > Until we all begin to acknowledge there’s more to life than “the hustle,” and that

I feel like this could describe a lot of the culture around startups, too: > Until we all begin to acknowledge there’s more to life than “the hustle,” and that struggling financially is not a personal failure, MLMs will continue to recruit and exploit aspiring girlbosses under the guise of female empowerment. You could easily change that to: > Until we all begin to acknowledge there’s more to life than “the hustle,” and that struggling financially is not a personal failure, startup culture will continue to recruit and exploit people under the guise of [getting rich, disrupting tech, changing the world, etc.]. I mean, it’s not an organized thing like an MLM, but I see a lot of the same toxic language and behavior around startups.

babypuncher 4y ago
It's extremely bad in Utah's startup scene, and I'm sure that is because we are also the MLM capital of the world. So many startups pop up and they don't even seem to have a good idea for solving a problem. It's a bunch of MBAs who think hiring a million engineers and having them build something will make everyone involved rich.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  That’s startup culture everywhere. And as long as the staff and founders areon payroll and not making terrible sacrifices, it’s just voluntary wealth transfer.
brtkdotse 4y ago
“ The epiphany that explains the crypto boom, Andrew Tate, “passive income” strategies, dropshipping, finance influencers, executive training programs, meme stocks, etc is the commercial realization that American men are extremely susceptible to multi-level marketing schemes” https://mobile.twitter.com/jherrerx/status/1612339869707108352 https://mobile.twitter.com/jherrerx/status/16123398697071083...
- derefr 4y ago
  A thing is only an MLM if the people at the top of it are actually getting rich off of the backs of the people below them. Which is true of some of the things in that list. But for others (e.g. dropshipping — and also "freelancing" for companies like Uber) it's just participation in a sector-wide race-to-the-bottom, where the free competition and commoditization of every role in the system drives margins at every step to zero, resulting in literally nobody getting rich.
  - Raed667 4y ago
    Pretty sure alibaba and über execs are doing just fine financially.
    - derefr 4y ago
      The people at "the top" of dropshipping aren't AliExpress/Wish/etc; they're rather the job-shop owners making the junk that gets sold on these sites. The supply chain originating from these factories existed long before these online dollar stores came into being as middle-men in it; before the online-ification of dollar stores, these factories used to directly contract with buyer-importers working for the brick-and-mortar dollar-store chains! These factories have never done too well for themselves. There's a reason they never achieve "escape velocity" into having brand recognition. Even before giant online dollar stores, their production (injection molding not-very-detailed plastic parts, etc) has always been a commodity; whoever's ordering runs of 10000 Alf stress-balls or what-have-you could swap Factory A out for Factory B at the drop of a hat. (And this is why you never hear of factories in China with genuinely good working conditions; the margins are too low for paying a living wage to be sustainable for the employer. And yes, this does imply that the businesses themselves shouldn't exist.) Also, while AliExpress/Wish/etc do make a profit, they do so on the back of a market distortion — the Universal Postal Union's special rates+tarriffs exception for ePackets shipped from China. Remove that, and such companies would collapse overnight.
      - Blahah 4y ago
        Surely the people at "the top" are the shareholders in AliExpress/Wish/Uber? The MLM is just a few levels, with everyone invested in making profits for the company that controls the platform.
nomilk 4y ago
True, but many pursuits are only financially advantageous for a small percent who 'make it' (startups and sports, for example). But take into account non-financial benefits too. In startups we're pushed to solve challenges that no MBA or CS curriculum would ever have conjured, plus we have a chance at making a dent in the universe. In sports people make friends and get regular fitness. These aren't financially beneficial, but they may be enough to make the pursuit worthwhile. But it's hard to find positives in a MLM Business. The participant is constantly stressed from short-term sales goals and has no spare time left for personal development.
- postsantum 4y ago
  Friends alienation too. There was a guy in our friends group that severed most of his relationships trying to sell Amway shit. Every time he initiated a conversation it was obvious where it will end
vinay_ys 4y ago
Information asymmetry is everywhere. In some cases this asymmetry is through organised structured hierarchy (employee vs manager/boss vs ceo/founder vs investor) and in some other cases there is no apparent overtly visible hierarchy – like open markets. Markets are "efficient" at transferring money from "stupid" to "smart" people. Here "stupid" or "smart" is directly related to lower or higher in that information/power hierarchy. This hierarchy is also self-amplifying in that it grows the asymmetry gap rapidly such that it becomes a very tall/pointy pyramid. So you could call it a "pyramid scheme". Some schemes are overt/explicit pyramid schemes where flow of value from people lower in hierarchy to people higher is explicitly structured and visible (like most MLM schemes) and some schemes are obfuscated/implicit in this aspect (like corporate job ladder with perf/promo process within employees and between employees vs founders/execs and investors).
- grufus 4y ago
  I think you are mixing up the general concept "hiearchy" with the very concrete concept of a "pyramid scheme". The defining characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that the income at each level is predominantly connected to the recruitment of new members into the scheme. Twice as many new members per unit time translates to twice as much income, roughly speaking. In management hierarchies, that may play a certain role, but your manager in a company isn't payed proportionally to how many new employees they recruit each month (unless they are explicitly a recruiter). It is rather proportional to the amount of responsibility which often correllates to the number of reports and their reports. In other words, oversimplified, in corporate hierarchies, the pay relates to the number of people below you, while in a pyramid scheme, it relates to the first derivative of that value.
  - Adrox 4y ago
    Except even if you receive money for a referral, you are still not getting any money FROM the referral. My company gives 5k if I reference a developer that they hire. But he gets his normal salary, it’s not like he has to pay 5k, or even it’s deducted from the salary. The problem with MLMs is that the money comes from other “members” not from sales… (Basically more than 80% of the revenue is other members and only 20% sales) A normal company 100% of the salaries comes from sales (or shareholders, never from employees).
irjustin 4y ago
I'll buck the trend and downvote. I dislike the hard-link comparison to startups. I personally know people who got sucked into MLMs and are almost exclusively lower income families. There are literal playbooks, talking points from the organized MLM's themselves on how to "recruit" your families and get them to buy their own product so they raise in "status". If you're connected to military moms' or lower income groups you know how pervasive and destructive these MLMs can be to these families. Not sure if you have any idea, but it is incredibly frustrating, disheartening to talk to them about how it's hurting them. In my case, it was their own cousin who got them involved and ultimately into debt. Not a 20's single-no-attachment, but this friend has a family to care for. I get angry simply remembering this. The only thing worse was for profit education. Startups simply aren't at that level and even bringing this argument into play detracts from the focus of how destructive MLMs are.
- maxbond 4y ago
  I think it's all the same ocean and a lot of foul creatures swim in it. Some of them are getting you into an MLM where you shuck oysters on a TikTok Live, some of them are selling you grifty courses about flipping houses, and some of them are selling you grifty courses about getting a job in tech. They're not necessarily all morally equivalent, but they're drawing from the same well of rise and grind hustle culture. MLMs are especially pernicious and harmful, but we do ourselves a disservice if we blind ourselves to the toxic culture that enables them - one that extends far beyond just MLMs.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Apparently, you've never watched those start-up tutorials sold on YouTube. Half the course is spent on arguing that by paying $2000 to learn how to make your own iOS apps, you're "investing in yourself". And of course the people that run the course make most of their money from running the course and not from actually releasing iOS apps... I recommend "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins" by "Folding Ideas" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
  - Out_of_Characte 4y ago
emodendroket 4y ago
Equity in startups is often some kind of joke, but at least they do give you your salary and health insurance as agreed.
maegul 4y ago
Similarly with ethics/activism driven NGOs (eg Greenpeace and the like), at least last time I was in touch with that part of the world. There was a knowing extraction of youthful “enthusiasm to do good”. It became a common warning passed around much like “HR is not your friend” etc. “They will use your enthusiasm” was what I heard. The only alteration in your formula necessary would be “struggling to live ‘ethically’“ for “struggling financially” and mutatis mutandis re empowerment/disrupting/changing the world.
teekert 4y ago
In this case I think using specific names and terms, tuned to a specific "market" helps trapped Girlbosses realize their situation. As the title says, OP is addressing a specific group. It's easier to think "yeah I'm not part of $group" if framed broadly as you are suggesting.
HlessClaudesman 4y ago
Startup culture has a fake it til you make it problem. In my journey as a 2x failed startup founder I meet many nice people, most of us were entranced by startup as performance theatre, occupying ourselves with every sort of entrepreneurial busy work except the harder work which would result in putting a product or service in front of customers, haunting an overpriced flexi-desk / office in incubator hell. And I met a few of the usual narcissists and sociopaths, scratching red in tooth and claw to become the Steve Jobs they knew themselves to be. The only success I saw coming out of this system was an idea founded by some serious programming talent that had obvious shot at product market fit before they wrote a single line of code. Everyone else was just fooling themselves.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Yesterday there was a story on the HN front page about a professor at the State University of New York at Albany who acts as an expert witness in litigation, sometimes in suits against Monsanto. He is 86 years old. Some commenter called this a "side hustle". WTF does this term mean, nevermind how ridiculous it is to apply it to this gentleman.^1 What purpose does it serve to use the term "side hustle". How does it improve upon the language that already exists. 1. Generally there are very few if any "full-time" expert witnesses. Obviously to be an "expert" one generally has to have engaged in something other than testifying as an one. Some might be semi-retired or retired professionals.
- danielheath 4y ago
  > Obviously to be an "expert" one generally has to have engaged in something other than testifying as an one. I don't know, it seems to work for a great many consultants.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    No court system is dragging 23 year old experts onto the stand to talk about "containerization"
c7b 4y ago
The study linked in the article says that 99% of MLM participants end up losing money. Unless you have some data to back up similar stats for startup employees, you're creating a false equivalence (and a startup failing isn't the same thing as the employees ending up with a net loss, mind you). https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/trade-regulation-rule-disclosure-requirements-and-prohibitions-concerning-business-opportunities-ftc.r511993-00008%C2%A0/00008-57281.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_com...
penguinvondoom 4y ago
The two are sides of the same coin and both are founded in the need of capitalism to make people work more so more profits can be made and more surplus extracted.

babypuncher 4y ago

It's extremely bad in Utah's startup scene, and I'm sure that is because we are also the MLM capital of the world. So many startups pop up and they don't even seem to have a good idea for solving a problem. It's a bunch of MBAs who think hiring a million engineers and having them build something will make everyone involved rich.

swatcoder 4y ago
That’s startup culture everywhere. And as long as the staff and founders areon payroll and not making terrible sacrifices, it’s just voluntary wealth transfer.

brtkdotse 4y ago

“ The epiphany that explains the crypto boom, Andrew Tate, “passive income” strategies, dropshipping, finance influencers, executive training programs, meme stocks, etc is the commercial realization that American men are extremely susceptible to multi-level marketing schemes” https://mobile.twitter.com/jherrerx/status/1612339869707108352 https://mobile.twitter.com/jherrerx/status/16123398697071083...

derefr 4y ago
A thing is only an MLM if the people at the top of it are actually getting rich off of the backs of the people below them. Which is true of some of the things in that list. But for others (e.g. dropshipping — and also "freelancing" for companies like Uber) it's just participation in a sector-wide race-to-the-bottom, where the free competition and commoditization of every role in the system drives margins at every step to zero, resulting in literally nobody getting rich.
- Raed667 4y ago
  Pretty sure alibaba and über execs are doing just fine financially.
  - derefr 4y ago
    The people at "the top" of dropshipping aren't AliExpress/Wish/etc; they're rather the job-shop owners making the junk that gets sold on these sites. The supply chain originating from these factories existed long before these online dollar stores came into being as middle-men in it; before the online-ification of dollar stores, these factories used to directly contract with buyer-importers working for the brick-and-mortar dollar-store chains! These factories have never done too well for themselves. There's a reason they never achieve "escape velocity" into having brand recognition. Even before giant online dollar stores, their production (injection molding not-very-detailed plastic parts, etc) has always been a commodity; whoever's ordering runs of 10000 Alf stress-balls or what-have-you could swap Factory A out for Factory B at the drop of a hat. (And this is why you never hear of factories in China with genuinely good working conditions; the margins are too low for paying a living wage to be sustainable for the employer. And yes, this does imply that the businesses themselves shouldn't exist.) Also, while AliExpress/Wish/etc do make a profit, they do so on the back of a market distortion — the Universal Postal Union's special rates+tarriffs exception for ePackets shipped from China. Remove that, and such companies would collapse overnight.
    - Blahah 4y ago
      Surely the people at "the top" are the shareholders in AliExpress/Wish/Uber? The MLM is just a few levels, with everyone invested in making profits for the company that controls the platform.

nomilk 4y ago

True, but many pursuits are only financially advantageous for a small percent who 'make it' (startups and sports, for example). But take into account non-financial benefits too. In startups we're pushed to solve challenges that no MBA or CS curriculum would ever have conjured, plus we have a chance at making a dent in the universe. In sports people make friends and get regular fitness. These aren't financially beneficial, but they may be enough to make the pursuit worthwhile. But it's hard to find positives in a MLM Business. The participant is constantly stressed from short-term sales goals and has no spare time left for personal development.

postsantum 4y ago
Friends alienation too. There was a guy in our friends group that severed most of his relationships trying to sell Amway shit. Every time he initiated a conversation it was obvious where it will end

vinay_ys 4y ago

Information asymmetry is everywhere. In some cases this asymmetry is through organised structured hierarchy (employee vs manager/boss vs ceo/founder vs investor) and in some other cases there is no apparent overtly visible hierarchy – like open markets. Markets are "efficient" at transferring money from "stupid" to "smart" people. Here "stupid" or "smart" is directly related to lower or higher in that information/power hierarchy. This hierarchy is also self-amplifying in that it grows the asymmetry gap rapidly such that it becomes a very tall/pointy pyramid. So you could call it a "pyramid scheme". Some schemes are overt/explicit pyramid schemes where flow of value from people lower in hierarchy to people higher is explicitly structured and visible (like most MLM schemes) and some schemes are obfuscated/implicit in this aspect (like corporate job ladder with perf/promo process within employees and between employees vs founders/execs and investors).

grufus 4y ago
I think you are mixing up the general concept "hiearchy" with the very concrete concept of a "pyramid scheme". The defining characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that the income at each level is predominantly connected to the recruitment of new members into the scheme. Twice as many new members per unit time translates to twice as much income, roughly speaking. In management hierarchies, that may play a certain role, but your manager in a company isn't payed proportionally to how many new employees they recruit each month (unless they are explicitly a recruiter). It is rather proportional to the amount of responsibility which often correllates to the number of reports and their reports. In other words, oversimplified, in corporate hierarchies, the pay relates to the number of people below you, while in a pyramid scheme, it relates to the first derivative of that value.
- Adrox 4y ago
  Except even if you receive money for a referral, you are still not getting any money FROM the referral. My company gives 5k if I reference a developer that they hire. But he gets his normal salary, it’s not like he has to pay 5k, or even it’s deducted from the salary. The problem with MLMs is that the money comes from other “members” not from sales… (Basically more than 80% of the revenue is other members and only 20% sales) A normal company 100% of the salaries comes from sales (or shareholders, never from employees).

irjustin 4y ago

I'll buck the trend and downvote. I dislike the hard-link comparison to startups. I personally know people who got sucked into MLMs and are almost exclusively lower income families. There are literal playbooks, talking points from the organized MLM's themselves on how to "recruit" your families and get them to buy their own product so they raise in "status". If you're connected to military moms' or lower income groups you know how pervasive and destructive these MLMs can be to these families. Not sure if you have any idea, but it is incredibly frustrating, disheartening to talk to them about how it's hurting them. In my case, it was their own cousin who got them involved and ultimately into debt. Not a 20's single-no-attachment, but this friend has a family to care for. I get angry simply remembering this. The only thing worse was for profit education. Startups simply aren't at that level and even bringing this argument into play detracts from the focus of how destructive MLMs are.

maxbond 4y ago
I think it's all the same ocean and a lot of foul creatures swim in it. Some of them are getting you into an MLM where you shuck oysters on a TikTok Live, some of them are selling you grifty courses about flipping houses, and some of them are selling you grifty courses about getting a job in tech. They're not necessarily all morally equivalent, but they're drawing from the same well of rise and grind hustle culture. MLMs are especially pernicious and harmful, but we do ourselves a disservice if we blind ourselves to the toxic culture that enables them - one that extends far beyond just MLMs.
fxtentacle 4y ago
Apparently, you've never watched those start-up tutorials sold on YouTube. Half the course is spent on arguing that by paying $2000 to learn how to make your own iOS apps, you're "investing in yourself". And of course the people that run the course make most of their money from running the course and not from actually releasing iOS apps... I recommend "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins" by "Folding Ideas" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
- Out_of_Characte 4y ago

emodendroket 4y ago

Equity in startups is often some kind of joke, but at least they do give you your salary and health insurance as agreed.

maegul 4y ago

Similarly with ethics/activism driven NGOs (eg Greenpeace and the like), at least last time I was in touch with that part of the world. There was a knowing extraction of youthful “enthusiasm to do good”. It became a common warning passed around much like “HR is not your friend” etc. “They will use your enthusiasm” was what I heard. The only alteration in your formula necessary would be “struggling to live ‘ethically’“ for “struggling financially” and mutatis mutandis re empowerment/disrupting/changing the world.

teekert 4y ago

In this case I think using specific names and terms, tuned to a specific "market" helps trapped Girlbosses realize their situation. As the title says, OP is addressing a specific group. It's easier to think "yeah I'm not part of $group" if framed broadly as you are suggesting.

HlessClaudesman 4y ago

Startup culture has a fake it til you make it problem. In my journey as a 2x failed startup founder I meet many nice people, most of us were entranced by startup as performance theatre, occupying ourselves with every sort of entrepreneurial busy work except the harder work which would result in putting a product or service in front of customers, haunting an overpriced flexi-desk / office in incubator hell. And I met a few of the usual narcissists and sociopaths, scratching red in tooth and claw to become the Steve Jobs they knew themselves to be. The only success I saw coming out of this system was an idea founded by some serious programming talent that had obvious shot at product market fit before they wrote a single line of code. Everyone else was just fooling themselves.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Yesterday there was a story on the HN front page about a professor at the State University of New York at Albany who acts as an expert witness in litigation, sometimes in suits against Monsanto. He is 86 years old. Some commenter called this a "side hustle". WTF does this term mean, nevermind how ridiculous it is to apply it to this gentleman.^1 What purpose does it serve to use the term "side hustle". How does it improve upon the language that already exists. 1. Generally there are very few if any "full-time" expert witnesses. Obviously to be an "expert" one generally has to have engaged in something other than testifying as an one. Some might be semi-retired or retired professionals.

danielheath 4y ago
> Obviously to be an "expert" one generally has to have engaged in something other than testifying as an one. I don't know, it seems to work for a great many consultants.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  No court system is dragging 23 year old experts onto the stand to talk about "containerization"

c7b 4y ago

The study linked in the article says that 99% of MLM participants end up losing money. Unless you have some data to back up similar stats for startup employees, you're creating a false equivalence (and a startup failing isn't the same thing as the employees ending up with a net loss, mind you). https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/trade-regulation-rule-disclosure-requirements-and-prohibitions-concerning-business-opportunities-ftc.r511993-00008%C2%A0/00008-57281.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_com...

penguinvondoom 4y ago

The two are sides of the same coin and both are founded in the need of capitalism to make people work more so more profits can be made and more surplus extracted.