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I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here

I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. Steve Jobs is sort of an exception here, not only was he adopted , but he was adopted by a very middle-class family . I find myself really good at developing small apps, but very bad when it comes to the business side. I would love to find someone to work with who's good with business. But so far I've just been time scammed a few times by morons who come up with insanely impractical ideas . And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. If you discuss modest technical limitations they'll berate you for corrupting their vision.

Aurornis 2y ago
> I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses. The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed. > And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity. The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories. There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can. I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.
- octopoc 2y ago
  I wonder if there’s a market for “work swapping” where founders of two separate companies will trade work without trading equity.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    At that point just pay me. If my normal billable rate is 70$ an hour I might offer a discount if your project is really neat. But I've never seen that, I've seen people wanting to me to sign contracts would say I will donate time, and these are never people who are realistic about what their chances are. You get all this hype where they claim someone offered them 100K just for the idea, but when you ask for $100 a month to host the server they don't have it .
  - a1j9o94 2y ago
    I was part of a group that did something like this. We used a crypto token system where if you joined the group you got X number of tokens and you could use that to get other people in the network to help with various tasks. Then the network would take a small percentage of equity in the companies of all the members.
    - mylastattempt 2y ago
      You left out the most interesting part: why _were_ you a part of it. Did it not work out, why not, or did you leave because of reasons not related to the (un)succes of this system?
hylaride 2y ago
Steve Jobs was connected: By being raised in Silicon Valley at just the right time. He even had a story (who knows how true it is) of him as a kid looking up Bill Hewlett in the phone book and asking about electronics parts (a frequency counter IIRC) and Bill not only got him the part, but gave him a summer job. As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs “learn” it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but not giving them full control. For larger examples of the latter, see Eric Schmidt as the “adult in the room” for Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  If you had to look up someone in the phone book you by definition aren't connected. Connected is when your Mom knows the chairman of IBM. Like with Gates.
  - mettamage 2y ago
    To add: most people didn't dare to just do that. Cold calling is a real skill, the biggest factor of being good at it is: having the courage to do it.
  - hylaride 2y ago
    Yeah, I know there’s a difference. It’s not the same as Bill Gates, but proximity is a connection all its own.
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      By that logic any entrepreneur can just scrape together a few bucks and ride a bus straight to San Francisco. I find it easier to just consider Steve Jobs to be exceptional here. He's the definition of not letting the circumstances of your birth dictate anything.
      - hylaride 2y ago
        Steve Jobs was absolutely exceptional, but there's a good chance we'd have never heard of him if he grew up on a farm in the 1960s/70s midwest and never ran into Woz (who also benefited from proximity to electronics), got inside XEROX/PARC, or was exposed to calligraphy in the college he dropped out of. Jobs has said himself on multiple occasions that he was lucky with timing and proximity to the industry and people, not that it lessens the immense grit that was still needed.
jongjong 2y ago
Yes, the social aspect is significant. It's not so much about innovating and strategizing as much as it is about playing politics with rich people and hope that they let you build a successful product. Let's face it, rich people make all the decisions. If you're not rich, it's all about socializing and luck for you. It's hard to find a rich person who will let you implement your vision and actually control your destiny. It's demoralizing TBH.
wat10000 2y ago
Jobs got his start in a tiny industry (tech was decently big already, but PCs were not) poised on the edge of massive growth as technology got to the point where you could build machines people would actually buy. And there was a huge moat, as the necessary talent was rare. And even within that rare talent, Jobs had the unique advantage of being able to partner with Woz. Nothing you can do today with a typical HN skill set will come even close to that. There are thousands (at least) of people with those skills. They can build it too, whatever it is. You’re not Woz and you don’t know a Woz. Likely there is no Woz today; everything computing is so much more specialized and complicated and layered and just plain big. You may be able to find success in this world, but it won’t be replicating the Jobs story.
gosub100 2y ago
Even he failed twice before he made it big.

Aurornis 2y ago

> I'm starting to think you really need to be well connected or at least come from an upper class background to win here. In my local startup community there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small startups founded by MBA students and recent college grads who clearly come from wealthy backgrounds. Nearly all of them either fail quickly or continue for years without getting any traction beyond their parents’ connections’ businesses. The other side of being wealthy and well connected is that it’s really tempting to fall back on a job with your family connections or to play startup for a few years while burning through “seed” money from the family without the real pressure of needing your startup to succeed. > And they never want to let you in for a full cut, they want to give you like 1% of the company in the event that you're able to build the entire thing out from scratch. There are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who need a cofounder but don’t want to give cofounder equity. The majority of successful founders and founding engineers I know had past working experience together. There are exceptions, but most of the time when someone goes searching for a cofounder or founding engineers because they don’t have anyone in their network, it doesn’t work out. It can work and does sometimes, but it’s so rare that I’m very surprised to hear success stories. There are just too many people in the startup community looking to “hustle” their way into an MVP without giving anything up in the process. Also a lot of people who want to be “cofounders” and get 50% of your company in exchange for doing as little work as they can. I was in a startup Slack for a while. Every other week someone would come in asking for advice about how to evict a deadbeat “cofounder” from their company who had secured 1/2 or 1/3 of the equity but wasn’t contributing anywhere near the other cofounders.

octopoc 2y ago
I wonder if there’s a market for “work swapping” where founders of two separate companies will trade work without trading equity.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  At that point just pay me. If my normal billable rate is 70$ an hour I might offer a discount if your project is really neat. But I've never seen that, I've seen people wanting to me to sign contracts would say I will donate time, and these are never people who are realistic about what their chances are. You get all this hype where they claim someone offered them 100K just for the idea, but when you ask for $100 a month to host the server they don't have it .
- a1j9o94 2y ago
  I was part of a group that did something like this. We used a crypto token system where if you joined the group you got X number of tokens and you could use that to get other people in the network to help with various tasks. Then the network would take a small percentage of equity in the companies of all the members.
  - mylastattempt 2y ago
    You left out the most interesting part: why _were_ you a part of it. Did it not work out, why not, or did you leave because of reasons not related to the (un)succes of this system?

hylaride 2y ago

Steve Jobs was connected: By being raised in Silicon Valley at just the right time. He even had a story (who knows how true it is) of him as a kid looking up Bill Hewlett in the phone book and asking about electronics parts (a frequency counter IIRC) and Bill not only got him the part, but gave him a summer job. As for business, many successful tech entrepreneurs “learn” it either as they go or by bringing on business experts, but not giving them full control. For larger examples of the latter, see Eric Schmidt as the “adult in the room” for Google, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook.

999900000999 2y ago
If you had to look up someone in the phone book you by definition aren't connected. Connected is when your Mom knows the chairman of IBM. Like with Gates.
- mettamage 2y ago
  To add: most people didn't dare to just do that. Cold calling is a real skill, the biggest factor of being good at it is: having the courage to do it.
- hylaride 2y ago
  Yeah, I know there’s a difference. It’s not the same as Bill Gates, but proximity is a connection all its own.
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    By that logic any entrepreneur can just scrape together a few bucks and ride a bus straight to San Francisco. I find it easier to just consider Steve Jobs to be exceptional here. He's the definition of not letting the circumstances of your birth dictate anything.
    - hylaride 2y ago
      Steve Jobs was absolutely exceptional, but there's a good chance we'd have never heard of him if he grew up on a farm in the 1960s/70s midwest and never ran into Woz (who also benefited from proximity to electronics), got inside XEROX/PARC, or was exposed to calligraphy in the college he dropped out of. Jobs has said himself on multiple occasions that he was lucky with timing and proximity to the industry and people, not that it lessens the immense grit that was still needed.

jongjong 2y ago

Yes, the social aspect is significant. It's not so much about innovating and strategizing as much as it is about playing politics with rich people and hope that they let you build a successful product. Let's face it, rich people make all the decisions. If you're not rich, it's all about socializing and luck for you. It's hard to find a rich person who will let you implement your vision and actually control your destiny. It's demoralizing TBH.

wat10000 2y ago

Jobs got his start in a tiny industry (tech was decently big already, but PCs were not) poised on the edge of massive growth as technology got to the point where you could build machines people would actually buy. And there was a huge moat, as the necessary talent was rare. And even within that rare talent, Jobs had the unique advantage of being able to partner with Woz. Nothing you can do today with a typical HN skill set will come even close to that. There are thousands (at least) of people with those skills. They can build it too, whatever it is. You’re not Woz and you don’t know a Woz. Likely there is no Woz today; everything computing is so much more specialized and complicated and layered and just plain big. You may be able to find success in this world, but it won’t be replicating the Jobs story.

gosub100 2y ago

Even he failed twice before he made it big.