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This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. Given enough chances you will make it, big. That means the #1 factor in success is th

• j45 11mo ago
  Well said, this is the real game to pursue. Best of continued luck.
• Aurornis 11mo ago
  This always sounded intuitively correct to me, but looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net. They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong. Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation. I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
  • jbs789 11mo ago
    If you don’t have a fall back, you have no choice but to make it work.
    • JustExAWS 11mo ago
      Or fail miserably…
      • fragmede 11mo ago
        Which we don't hear about. Except maybe via GoFundMe.
      • b112 11mo ago
        You know what? Peter used to say, that every successful company could look back at a defining moment early on, where they would have died had it not been for the courage, and the tenacity, and maybe the insanity of one visionary person who put it all on the line, even though it seemed like a huge mistake at the time. A moment where all the metrics and the numbers didn't mean anything. It was all about the emotion. It was about belief, rational or irrational. And I think... I hope that I just witnessed that.
        • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
          On the other hand, no matter what you do, you can’t invest like Warren Buffett. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/11/19/why-you-cant-invest-like-warren-buffett-and-shouldnt-try/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/11/19/why-you-... The whole idea of succeeding by “grit” makes way too many people too idealistic and unrealistic. Don’t get me wrong, Peter Drucker (hopefully that’s the Peter you are referring to) had some great actionable advice. But believing in yourself and having grit is about as banal as “thoughts and prayers”
          • anukin 11mo ago
            I hope it’s Peter drucker instead of Peter griffin
        • toss1 11mo ago
          You know what? This is indeed where courage, tenacity, and risk-taking make a difference. But what makes the difference in whether or not we hear about it is pure luck and survivor bias. If their luck was just right that with all that push in the right time the deal came through or the product sold, then we hear about what a great success it was, and how important was their grit. And many smart determined people with all the courage, tenacity, and risk-taking in the world have also taken the big risk, but dice did not roll their way, or the hill was just so steep it didn't work, so we hear nothing of them. And their number likely vastly exceeds the few for whom it did work.
    • wat10000 11mo ago
      Cortez burning^Wscuttling his ships.
    • WJW 11mo ago
      And if making it by hoping really really hard doesn't work, try suicide or something?
  • zmmmmm 11mo ago
    you can extend that to all Silicon Valley and the US in general. It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets". I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
    • bequanna 11mo ago
      > Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. …except it is. Health insurance is available on a sliding scale based on income and essentially free for most low income people.
      • nradov 11mo ago
        Sure, although in some areas healthcare is effectively unavailable to Medicaid plan members because providers have stopped accepting those patients. Being insured doesn't mean much if you can't schedule an appointment. https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicaid-insurers-doctor-networks-appointments-72f9c11f https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicaid-insurers-doct...
        • deleted 11mo ago
          [deleted]
      • agf 11mo ago
        In some areas and for some people, Medicaid probably does count as proper healthcare. But it certainly doesn't for other people / other places. Imagine there being one doctor within a multi-million person metro area who takes Medicaid for some sub-specialty. 90 minutes away from you by car. And you don't have a car. This is the reality for millions of Medicaid recipients, including ones I know personally in Chicago.
        • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
          Not Medicaid, subsidized ACA. I know a lot of young healthy people that just take the chance of not having health care. Worse case you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip if you have to go the emergency room. I don’t think my older (step)son has had insurance since he got off our plan at 26 over two years ago.
  • moralestapia 11mo ago
    Every single western "entrepreneur" who starts making a little more than 100k/year likes to tell itself this story. Did you have any (real, not GenZ) mental or physical disability? Did you have a house to come back to every day? Did you have a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wanted? Did you have a community that supported you through your business? Did you have a legal structure around you that allowed you not to worry about getting kidnapped/killed? A structure that enforces getting paid after you've earned your money? 98% of what you have was given. I do agree, however, that a lot of people don't even bother to put in the remaining 2%.
    • LPisGood 11mo ago
      All of those things are great and should be afforded to every Person. In many places, they are.
    • cadamsdotcom 11mo ago
      “Can you start a business without $10m of family capital” is a societal question. “Can you start a business on an empty stomach without a roof over your head” is not the same debate. A roof over your head is a prerequisite to almost everything else in life - starting a business is WAY down the list. Better to have societies work to provide food and roofs - which they do, with varying degrees of success.
      • moralestapia 11mo ago
        It is the exact same debate. People without those things cannot play the lottery as many times as those who have them. They might not even get to play it once. If everyone around you has all of those basic human needs met, you are the exception. But of course people don't like to hear this, because their whole meritocracy myth (which has always been trash) comes falling down and they might be forced to admit that, please excuse me for making this outrageous statement, ... you're just an average person with slightly better luck than others. (It is true, however, that "luck" compounds through your life and even more through generations, though. But that even detracts from the meritocracy myth even more, as the family you're born in greatly defines what you'll achieve.)
  • konaraddi 11mo ago
    > looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).
  • enaaem 11mo ago
    There is also survivor bias at play here. Succeeding without safety net is hard -> only the best can do it -> the best entrepreneurs you know did not had a safety net
    • hammock 11mo ago
      Then let’s control for that. Among people with a decent safety net, can we correlate eventual success with number of tries? The answer seems self evident, but idk for sure, and I would like to know the Gini coefficient of successes vs failures among safety netters be that of non-safety netters. Wouldn’t we expect the successes within the safety net to be massively larger on average than those of the non-safety netters, given that a safety net affords you so many more swings to take? Your comment suggests that this is not the case, driven by the selection/survivor effect within non-safety net
      • lesuorac 11mo ago
        I mean Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc all had a safety net. Also need to define what successful means because a lot of trades people are successful solo-prenuers but don't make more than say a doctor.
        • hammock 11mo ago
          Look at success in buckets. 10x , 100x, 1000x etc
        • jryle70 11mo ago
          In a thread about survivor bias, and you fall for the same trap. How many people coming from wealthy background end up failing? Take Bill Gates, his father cofounded a law firm, and his mother was a board members of several firms. That is a very wealthy background, but not outrageously so. How many people of the same level of wealth became successful businesspeople? It's said that his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO at the time was a more instrumental factor to his eventual success than his family's wealth, and his own effort of course.
  • Normal_gaussian 11mo ago
    I've seen quite a few of these funded entrepreneur-lifestyle kids now; I've worked (briefly) with many of their companies. Many of them are making enough of a real go at it such that I can't tell them from others, but quite a few don't know enough about how a default alive business works and deliver a DoA even when the core idea or a short pivot works and has traction - these guys need so much better PMF to succeed. The best businesses I've seen parents find for their children are lettings agents (urgh) and basic manufacturing (last mile door assembly etc.). You can get the business model in a six month course, the staff are minimum wage, the product is high margin. If your parents buy the building you are so close to default alive its a joke. Grow the business, flip it, and try the big idea.
  • hooverd 11mo ago
    Well, how many non-successful entrepreneurs and business owners do you know?
  • an0malous 11mo ago
    Who are you thinking of? Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk all came from wealthy families. They all had the safety net of their family wealth if their business didn’t work out. Even someone who had parents to pay their student loans is relatively privileged, not everyone starts their 20’s debt-free and able to take financial risks.
    • wisty 11mo ago
      What was Musk families net worth? I hear this conspiracy theory that he's was super rich. But owning a mine could mean anything from a basically bankrupt speculator to the De Beers. There's claims he gave Musk $28k ... that's not evena decent college fund.
      • wnevets 11mo ago
        They had this amount of money > As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.” [1] [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-made-money-rich-b2212599.html https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-made-money-ric...
        • eru 11mo ago
          That seems pretty silly. Why keep your wealth as cash in a safe? (And why not use a fraction of the money to buy a second safe, if you really have to keep it in a safe at home.)
          • prerok 11mo ago
            That was probably just their pocket money.
            • 11mo ago
  • wat10000 11mo ago
    I’d expect it to stratify based on the kind of business. Typical small businesses (plumbing, HVAC, restaurants, convenience stores) I’d expect to come from poorer families. These businesses are a potential avenue to success without traditional credentials, and they’re not the sort of thing somebody is likely to start as a passion. From wealthy families, I’d expect vanity businesses. There wouldn’t be as much motivation for the annoying aspects of a real business. And anyone who is interested in business can probably get a nice start in something their family owns or has a major stake in. Moonshot companies I’d expect to come from the upper middle class, children of doctors and such. Not fabulously wealthy, so the potential for making millions can still be a big motivator. But comfortable enough to get advanced schooling and be willing to aim big with a chance of failure, rather than going for something mundane you know is always in demand, like fixing pipes. Off the top of my head, Gates, Page, and Zuckerberg all fit that mold.
  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
    Would be interesting to run the priors on this and say what is the probability of startup success given "rich" "middle class" and "poor". Otherwise maybe more poor people try startups so success will be biased towards them (rich will take over daddy or mommy business... maybe take a shot at a startup for fun but say meh lets try the business, plus there are waaaaay fewer rich). Or to put it another way: Most people who live >100 are also from modest backgrounds too. As are olympic gold winners. Us paupers are the best!
  • satvikpendem 11mo ago
    This is literally survivorship bias. All the successful ones you know of, because the unsuccessful ones failed, by definition.
  • NoLinkToMe 11mo ago
    Good to share, but n=1 I suppose. For me (also n=1) it's the opposite in my circle. The ones without resources never went anywhere and reproduced their parents' class. The ones with resources that went into entrepreneurship (and had the possibility of failing and still being fine) are the most successful. Agreed on your final point though! Tenacity probably is the biggest driver.
  • directevolve 11mo ago
    If most successful entrepreneurs are from ordinary backgrounds, one explanation is that most entrepreneurs, successful or unsuccessful, are from ordinary backgrounds. Another is that wealthy families might be pushing kids into entrepreneurship who lack the talent or taste for it.
  • aprilthird2021 11mo ago
    Is this statistically true or just your experience? I'd be very surprised if it was more than just anecdotal. > They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong. Lots of well-resourced kids do this and more can do this. By the law of averages they should be overrepresented in successes here. > When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation. Does needing to succeed make businesses succeed? I don't think so, tbh.
  • HWR_14 11mo ago
    When did you meet the successful entrepreneurs and business owners? Because unless you met them when they were starting out survivorship bias would account for that.
  • keepamovin 11mo ago
    That's kind of true. If you have a safety net, you kind of make the wrong decisions, optimize stuff that doesn't cut through the noise and leave something on the track. It's like that scene in Dark Knight Rises where he only makes the impossible jump out of the prison when he doesn't have the safety rope.
  • bear141 11mo ago
    The defeatist attitude in the reply’s to this comment are unreal. Try hard or don’t. It’s up to you. At least with the one way you might have a chance.
    • yoz-y 11mo ago
      Most attempts fail and if you get into debt you don’t get to try again. I agree that it takes a special kind of person to try and try again, but it clearly is not for everyone. A lot has to come together, you need to be alone, have a very supportive partner or be a sociopath (willing to drag your family down with you). You need to be in the right place (or have the means to move there). This usually works when you are young, so definitely having starting capital from somewhere works. This was much easier in the marking moments of technology where any simple tool or game could be transformed into cash. Nowadays you really need to luck out. Europe has generally better safety net and much less entrepreneurship spirit for example. So it pushes both ways. I guess one last thing is this weird thing in the US where investors somehow like people who previously failed. Like Elizabeth Holmes who reportedly went from prison right back into the game. With that environment of course it makes sense to just try again.
    • aprilthird2021 11mo ago
      Acknowledging reality isn't defeatist. It's very likely that successful entrepreneurs statistically do come from richer families. We shouldn't ignore this fact because it's more fun and emotionally rewarding to us to pretend otherwise
    • zamadatix 11mo ago
      Acknowledging e.g. people who grow up in multilingual households usually have an easier time learning a new language than someone who didn't shouldn't just be about what decision an individual should make for themselves, it's about identifying what stimulates that kind of growth so we get more of that success overall. I.e. making a decision or not to go for the chance myself is a different topic than trying to find ways to increase the chances for everyone. Economic growth is not a 0 sum game so why talk about the situations around it from only an individual gain perspective. If a lot of individuals are saying some situational factor makes the choice unreasonably hard then that's something worth focusing on rather than dismissing.
  • haritha-j 11mo ago
    Reminds me of the whole you can only succeed when you don’t have the reassurance of a safety net weighing you down idea from dark knight rises.
  • nosianu 11mo ago
    > over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know This very much sounds like survivorship bias to me. But more importantly, I think the discussion is going off the track. The important ones are the 0.1%, not the 1% or 10%. The "normal" millionaire business owner usually actually worked for it (unless they are pure finance or something similar). They are also not the ones shifting a whole country's politics with their enormous influence. They don't have any over-inflated influence over anything. They are not the problem. But they also don't serve as examples for the masses, because that would be confusing "anyone can do this" with "everyone can do this" - their successes don't scale. You can only have that many successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, the majority must be their worker bees by necessity. I see such discussions as distractions. If you talk about normal entrepreneurship you will not get to the core of our problems, not at the very top (the super rich), not at the bottom (why are so many so poor). If you want to come up with an idea that works at scale you can't use one that only works for some no matter what. If you want to come up with a solution for the enormous imbalances looking at those normal entrepreneurs does not help either. I suggest to develop an instinct to use in these kinds of discussions: For every concrete example, imagine it at scale. Thinking at individual examples when you talk about big things is a mismatch. Those examples are only useful if you use them to extrapolate upwards, what would actually happen if everybody did this?
    • renewiltord 11mo ago
      If the most important factor in survivorship is number of chances you can take; and the number of chances is proportional to how much wealth you have; then the survivorship bias should go the other way. Otherwise it’s overwhelmed by something else, perhaps the sheer ratio of the differing populations.
  • lumb63 11mo ago
    I believe we all intuitively push whatever our advantages are, often without even knowing it. The advantage that the wealthy have are connections, capital, and familial support. These advantages lend themselves to activities such as starting businesses with high capital requirements, accumulating assets (“investing”), working through elite colleges to land a prestigious position, heading a philanthropy or charity, etc. That advantage comes with a disadvantage. Because the wealthy do not have to work to earn their start, they never learn what hard work is capable of producing, and never build the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” habit. What they have in money, they lack in grit. When they are faced with a challenge, they habitually say “what can I buy to solve this problem?”, “who can I consult to help me with this problem?”, etc. Contrast that with folks who are working class. They know that they don’t have the advantage of money. They learn that hard work is the behavior that yields the best outcome. They put themselves in fields where what you get is proportional to what you put in, such as the trades, where working long, hard hours can generate quite good income. When folks who were raised working class are faced with adversity, they handle the situation like Boxer from Animal Farm: “I will work harder”. It’s what they know how to do. While they don’t have copious sums of money to fall back on, or other natural advantages, their own work ethic is one of the few things that cannot be taken away from them, and so they leverage that. That advantage also comes with disadvantages. Someone who works very hard will likely be overly self reliant. They might not get as much done as they could have had they spread the load across other people. They might burn themselves out, injure themselves, work to the exclusion of all other goals in life, etc. These are vast generalizations that obviously won’t hold in all circumstances, but I think it’s useful to illustrate the point. People use the tools at their disposal, whether that be money or otherwise. Those strategies all have advantages and disadvantages. The net result of those is likely visible in the outcomes of various people, I’d bet.
  • ineedasername 11mo ago
    Of the people, did any fail? If so, this is one of the questions that matters most when assessing whether or not there was a safety net— in failing, did they either wind up at the destitute/homeless/food-bank level, or a mountain of unpaid debt holding back future endeavors? If the ones who met with failure didn’t face these things or something comparable then they did have safety nets.
  • skeeter2020 11mo ago
    I also disagree with the GP (with the definitive explanation; it's probably at least partially true), but this: >> basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net. is not statisically accurate; you're only looking at survivors. The successful Gates/Zucks/Musks might outnumber the poor Indian kids; we need both the failure counts and some sort of qualitive definition of success/failure (i.e. a rich-kid failure is probably not life destroying)
  • bobmcnamara 11mo ago
    Growing up I thought that my family was rich because my parents were still together, we owned a home with a foundation with help from the bank, and my family was clean. It turns out the bar was real low in my hometown. "...didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net" As someone who grew up considered both a dirt poor hick by the city slickers and simultaneously a carpet-baggin outsider, this is often a relative perspective, how do we calibrate against a larger population? These are the sorts of things I picked up on growing up: Could they go to college if they wanted to? Did their parents go to college? Did they live homeless, apartments, trailers, multi family, single family homes, McMansions? 0/1/2 parents around? I suspect HackerNews may have some survivorship bias compared to national averages, (and especially where I grew up).
• fragmede 11mo ago
  That sounds good, but with a safety net, are you really going to be hungry enough to make sure your one shot at getting out of the ghetto doesn't fail? The entrepreneur that says to themselves, if this doesn't work, I'll just ask mom for another $300k at St Barts over Christmas doesn't sound like the one sleeping under the desk at the office to get the demo ready for TechCrunch Disrupt. Or maybe they are (to prove daddy wrong). The human condition contains multitudes.
  • ikiris 11mo ago
    Ahh yes, classic HN: "People only succeed/work hard if their only other option is death"
    • saimiam 11mo ago
      My wife and I are starting to test this theory. We are putting our kid in an expensive school, then starting a business to support our lifestyle. If we fail, our kid’ll have to go to a cheaper school and we’d have lost a few years of school fees. If we succeed, yay. By the time, our are faced with the choice, our kid will be embedded in school so ripping them out of it is going to be a tough choice. So, yeah, we’re essentially burning our boats and fighting to survive.
      • ipaddr 11mo ago
        Don't live above your means because an unexpected event is likely to happen. Plus creating a situation where all peers are rich and only your kid is not doesn't open the doors to future success compared to if they were at their peers lifestyle level.
        • saimiam 11mo ago
          We grappled with this too but in the end, our decision was influenced by our parents choosing to live beyond their means to put us through good schools and college. If they could grit their teeth and sacrifice for us, we can do the same for the next generation. Our choice us somewhat made easier because we didn’t like any of the schools near us except this one. The others were focused on exams/results and were larger in size so felt more “corporate”.
• clichessuck 11mo ago
  That's a cliche and it sucks. A safety net and family resources correlate with nothing related to entrepeneurship and risk taking.
  • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    This is definitely not true. How many people for instance can go into journalism and do unpaid internships without family support? The entire idea of most entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in tech is a myth. Out of all of major tech companies now, how many of the founders came from disadvantaged backgrounds?
  • augusto-moura 11mo ago
    Safety net and resources correlates heavily in almost all aspects of your life, having a better life helps immensely in any project you do in your life, including entrepreneurship
  • 1659447091 11mo ago
    > A safety net and family resources correlate with nothing related to entrepeneurship and risk taking You might be on to something, just look at the examples here. Being successful in tech and a well-known risk taker seems strongly related to having a 4-5 letter last name. Bezos, Brin, Dell, Gates, Page, Jobs, Musk, Thiel...Zuckerberg, okay an outlier, but everyone just says Zuck -- so tossup?/s
• ryandrake 11mo ago
  It's like a baseball game. Most people are benched their whole lives. They never get a chance at the plate. More privileged people with a lucky combination of the right family, the right education, the right timing, and the right opportunity get an at-bat, and they'll either strike out, or hit the ball. A few very lucky people will get to stand at the plate maybe once or twice more. The wealthy get infinite at-bats. They get to stand at the plate for however long they want, and swing and swing until they get their home run. I worked with a founder like this. He would always talk about his business's humble beginnings, starting from a garage and so on--you know the story. What he would neglect to admit was this was like his 7th try. Every time he failed, he'd just chill on his family's couch, dreaming up his next startup idea.
  • 1659447091 11mo ago
    I think it was Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) that talked about a similar concept as well. Ignoring the 10k hour thing, it also talks abut small compounding advantages that later add up to more opportunity (for those that take it). To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill. There was also a similar concept floating around about darts, where the poor get maybe one dart to throw, middle class a few and wealthier get many. But I can't remember where I saw or read that
    • avensec 11mo ago
      Thanks for the book mention. Adam Grant also talks about the age-group concept, but leans on it for a different end, in Hidden Potential.
      • 1659447091 11mo ago
        The description sounds like a part 2 or updated approach/angle to Mindset (Carol Dweck), a book that made a changing impact when I first read it, but reading the updated edition years later left me wanting more. I had also read a couple of Adam Grant's earlier books and enjoyed them, will definitely check out Hidden Potential.
• raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  This is not true. No matter how many different teams I try out for, I as a 51 year old short male with a limp will never be a star basketball player or ever make it to even the D leagues. There are plenty of people who tried repeatedly to “succeed” in their own company and failed. Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress
  • busymom0 11mo ago
    I think the level of success one wants also require having a check for delusion and realism. If a "51 year old short limp" thinks they are going to be a star basketball player, they are delusional and no longer realistic.
    • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      How many people right here on HN have you seen over the years who built something and had no idea about marketing or a go to market strategy or knew anything about sales? That’s the equivalent of a 51 year old with a limp not being self aware enough to know that I don’t have the skills to be a basketball player just because I can dribble.
    • nosianu 11mo ago
      So you agree with the parent commenters actual point and counter-example, great!
  • ipaddr 11mo ago
    You as a short 51 year old could create your own league. Be a star. But no you cannot play in other leagues with younger players.
    • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      See my other comment about being able to create a product and not having a go to market strategy or sales is like thinking just because I can dribble doesn’t mean I would succeed in the NBA.
• LPisGood 11mo ago
  Out of curiosity (not accusation, I promise) how did you make it?
• nine_k 11mo ago
  If your energy is finite (which is normally the case), the effect may also depend on the energy per shot you spend. A birdshot allows you to hit great many possible targets, but only very weakly. A buckshot hits fewer targets, but packs a bit more punch. A FMJ bullet shot from a sniper rifle allows you to hit an exact target with a great force, but you have to choose carefully. What worked for me best was looking around a lot, identifying a few worthy targets, and aiming well.
• jandrewrogers 11mo ago
  The key ingredient is the courage to try, not the safety net. Countries lauded for their strong safety nets are not overflowing with people taking ambitious risks. Often quite the opposite; the strong safety net reflects a cultural aversion to risk. People with the courage to try don’t need a safety net to do it. In practice they seem to be almost inversely correlated. An important aspect not mentioned is feeling like you will be adequately rewarded if your calculated risks pay off. This seems to be more pertinent than safety nets in practice.
  • raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    Look at the founders of the top 100 most valuable companies in the US. How many of them came from poverty?
  • musebox35 11mo ago
    That is insightful. Courage to take risks means higher standard deviation in outcomes, more visible successes, but also more hard failures. Risk averse cultures have more stable outcomes, no big successes, but also less financially crippling failures. A personal or social safety net may or may not make you risk averse. Taking semi-calculated risks seems like a skill that needs to be learned for successful entrepreneurship.
  • GuB-42 11mo ago
    Survivorship bias. On a personal level, if you take risks, there is a good chance for you to just fail and be forgotten to history. You can make it big, but is it worth the risk? On a country level, it is different. With millions of people trying, some of them will succeed. To produce high achievers, a country doesn't need to provide people with a safety net, it only needs to produce a lot of people.
• ekianjo 11mo ago
  > This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. The idea of a safety net is a silly idea. The whole world had very little safety net just 100 years ago, and we still managed fine to make progress and to get out of poverty (on average). On the contrary, when you know you have very little safety net, you tend to try harder and to persevere a lot more.
  • blharr 11mo ago
    > The idea of electricity is a silly idea. The whole world had very little electricity just 100 years ago. and we still managed fine to make progress This is just an argument from tradition and not even a good one. It's debatable (and maybe impossible to prove) if it's even true. 100 years ago, the global economy fell into a huge decline that led to more global safety nets. Then, were there even less safety nets 50 years ago? And did that lack of existence not hinder progress? > you tend to try harder Is there any actual evidence for this? If I don't have a social net, I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to try harder at my risky, innovative product. I'm going to give up and do something 'safe' that only marginally increases economic output.
  • BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
    Would you like a golden sticker?
• mantas 11mo ago
  If safety net was the key ingredient, European startups should killing it. And yet US without a safety net is doing so much better.
• ido 11mo ago
  not necessarily how inherently good you are That said, being inherently good also helps. I know (several) people who knocked it out of the park with literally their first attempt out of university in their early 20s. It wasn't just luck, they are genuinly unusually talented.
  • blharr 11mo ago
    Sure, but this argument will never mention those that were just as good that failed. Simply to selection bias.
• baxtr 11mo ago
  You need to have the money, the energy, and patience to experiment until you get it right. Money: do it while you’re young and don’t need a lot. Or get first rich. Or collect enough money on a dream. Energy: again being young helps. Having 2 smalls kids and old parents doesn’t. Patience: that’s the more esoterical part. It’s hard to know when to keep on grinding and when to quit.
• lazy_afternoons 11mo ago
  Completely Agree. Both Romans and Mongols have lost/retreated many battles. They just had to regroup and raise another army over and over again. Some of their opponents could not even afford the war even after winning over them multiple times. The other sides simply were more fragile, where you were defending and once your city falls, you are done. Avoid risk of ruin. Keep the ability of taking multiple shots with upside in your favor.
• breppp 11mo ago
  It's interesting how the American narrative changed from "hard work will make you succeed" to "only privilege will make you succeed". I think the newer iteration is just setting the country for failure and is an excuse why being lazy is okay
  • gota 11mo ago
    How is (the assumption one needs) trying multiple times "lazier" than once?
    • breppp 11mo ago
      The underlying subtext if I read it correctly is I had a lot of chances because I was lucky to be born into a specific background when you start subscribing to determinism (i was ordained by my parents to succeed), the logical next step is not to try hard
• ericmcer 11mo ago
  I dunno... based on having worked for ~10 small to midsize companies now and getting to interact frequently with the founders at almost all of them, I wouldn't say a safety net was the common thread. They were however all highly driven, a bit sociopathic, insanely confident and had some kind of chip on their shoulder. A few wanted to "beat daddy", some had wealthy wives and wanted to fit in with their in-laws, and others just seemed mad at something or someone in their industry and wanted to outdo them. The #1 factor for success imo is being angry with reality and being arrogant enough to think you should impose your will on it. People who are given infinite chances will just fail a few times and settle into a safe life.
• skeeter2020 11mo ago
  Not sure I 100% agree. First: you can temper you ambition and thus the risk. You do not need to go ALL IN for almost anything. It may take longer or be fractional vs. the initial ambitions but probably also far more realistic. Second: the counter example of succeeding because you NEED to; the "burn the ships!" approach. If you know you can fail it inevitably tempers your efforts too. You might not want to do this if you're the sole bread winner for an entire family, but when you're young and independent? Maybe. Combine this with the first and I think there's lots of paths to success.