10 ms·

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no ga

• no_wizard 1y ago
  would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines
  • masfuerte 1y ago
    It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.
    • mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Even being able to type in a comment box is a privilege, as is life.
      • groby_b 1y ago
        Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources. Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.
    • jackphilson 1y ago
      Even the amount of agency you have is a privilege. Hard determinism.
  • ryandrake 1y ago
    It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.
    • mbrumlow 1y ago
      Sure. But I think the notion is that a huge group of people also had that same level funding and privilege, but did nothing with it. Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school. While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self. They clearly did something different out of the very large common group they belonged to.
      • jacobsenscott 1y ago
        Random chance, and maybe a little skill.
        • bluefirebrand 1y ago
          Don't forget connections Having well connected parents and family is huge, and a big part of why a lot of these people are so wildly successful
          • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
            That's how Elizabeth Holmes went from a rando Stanford drop out to a "billionaire" Her father was head of a Federal govt agency at one point and a VP at Enron (I know, I know). Also, a direct descendant of the Fleischmann yeast family. Her mother also had worked as a Congressional aide.
      • ryandrake 1y ago
        > They clearly did something different Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper? There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • monknomo 1y ago
    What I took from it is that the story about starting a company in a garage is about the humble origins. But to start a company in a garage you must have access to a garage; lots of people do not have this level of resources. The origins of these companies are not as humble as they sound, they rely access to resources that are not actually common (unless you look from the POV of a well-offish 'middle class' family)
    • mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Yes, though in the eighties and somewhat to the nineties you could own a home with modest job.
      • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
        That was the era before globalization hollowed out the middle class
        • mixmastamyk 1y ago
          Ok, though believe the major factor was a refusal to build enough new housing.
    • jacobsenscott 1y ago
      Having a garage isn't enough. A lot of people with garages need to work everyday to pay for their garage, and food, and everything else. Bezos and Jobs both had free garages and free time paid for by their parents. I would bet the others mentioned in the post had the same sort of freebies.
      • tdrz 1y ago
        I got a lot of freebies from my parents and never been able to build a multi-billion dollar company. I do believe you need someone to have your back for the basics, but there's much more to it.
      • throwaway-blaze 1y ago
  • PeterFBell 1y ago
    If you live with your parent in a double wide in a trailer park and need to work at the local Target every night since high school to make enough money to help pay for groceries for the family, you might have a harder time working 100 hour weeks on the off chance that you'll raise a round and start a company. You probably also don't know many VC's or live too close to where they hang out. Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.
  • indoordin0saur 1y ago
    These successes come from the middle-class, not the working classes. You could take it further and note that even just owning a home as a young person isn't really attainable for the middle-class anymore. Things were simply easier back then.
• ryandrake 1y ago
  I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.
  • tough 1y ago
    Look into bill gates mom ;)
    • citizenpaul 1y ago
      I mean Bill Gates grandparents were buddies with the Rockerfellers. Even if Gates didn't directly get money from them simply being close to that level of influence and power gives you essentially freedom to print money with very little effort through effortless connections to whatever you need. Oh you need advice from a $10,000 a day law firm for a difficult business situation? My dads friend John works at "prestigious law-firm" I'll get him to get us some feedback on the situation.
      • lostmsu 1y ago
        That particular bit is going to be "equalized" soon by AI
        • tough 1y ago
          You can't generate prestige tho, only the fake outputs. In the case of law at least, it is true you can no side-step the 10k fee for a -consultancy- but lawyers and doctors will remain a human guarded work for long imho, at least in the sign-off phase, even if they use these tools to amplify their work
      • umbra07 1y ago
        My grandmother's best friend was a princess. She still grew up somewhat impoverished (middle-lower class).
    • wslh 1y ago
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Ain’t no trailer parks without engineers and mechanics designing trailers. Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.
  • kevinventullo 1y ago
    Whoosh
  • twen_ty 1y ago
    That also created the biggest singular transfer of wealth. So your argument is that the peasants are no longer starving and well fed. If that's the ambition level you're happy to live by then there's no further comment.
• mandevil 1y ago
  The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.
  • Gud 1y ago
    Also his granddad was loaded.
    • steveBK123 1y ago
      Yeah an unsurprisingly large percent of self-styled.. self-made billionaires certainly came from close to or actual millionaire backgrounds. I suppose it shouldn't be terribly surprising as being successful requires hard work & a good idea. But it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.
      • wing-_-nuts 1y ago
        >it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides. I graduated in 2008, and I watched classmates make the 'insane' decision to risk it all and go off and try to found startups. Inevitably, some failed, but to my shock it wasn't the end of the world for them? In one case the 'bank of mom and dad' paid rent until they got back on their feet, and in the other, they moved into an ADU in their parent's back yard. That's when it hit me that those folks took risks because they could afford to. I was worried about winding up sleeping under a bridge. That concern was as foreign to them as the thought of having a safety net to fall back on was to me.
        • toomuchtodo 1y ago
          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 "Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work. Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
• K0balt 1y ago
  This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time. Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege. Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk. My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap. They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since. Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house. By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons. But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine. You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month. You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do. Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe. Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do. I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand. Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.
• boringg 1y ago
  What are you trying to imply - sounds like your trying to make a broad but vague statement.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• dabockster 1y ago
  Ain't no garages in low rise apartments either. I'm really believing now that the lack of hard science startups in the past decade+ is a byproduct of the US housing crisis. No single family home with a garage, no space to physically put a server.