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Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich

• davidu 17y ago
  1) Being an entrepreneur, for me, isn't about being wealthy, it's about being successful. 2) Rich is a variable term, and intended to be so. Entrepreneurship may not make you wealthy, but it can certainly make you rich. I enjoy the freedom and independence afforded by starting EveryDNS and OpenDNS. Both contain a passion for a system I love, the DNS, and both have let me help millions of consumers around the world. I even like knowing I control the DNS for millions and millions of Internet users. That's an awesome responsibility and it certainly makes me feel rich about everything I do. And when it comes to money, Eric is only somewhat right. He says you should get a job that rewards and promotes effort. But lots of lawyers and finance kids in New York thought they had stable jobs that would make them rich. Ask them today and most will tell you a different story altogether. Now they hate their jobs and have no job security or path to becoming really wealthy. So like I said, being entrepreneur, for me, isn't about being wealthy, it's about being successful. That's a measuring stick that's far more important. PS- Eric is awesome and I like that he's beating the drum on this stuff, I wish I were doing more of it. :-)
  • domodomo 17y ago
    I heart OpenDNS! Just thought I would jump in and say so. That is all.
  • gits_tokyo 17y ago
    Can't agree more. People that I've spoken with in the past more often than not associated the idea of me doing a startup in the tech industry with gaining massive wealth. While I may entertain this, deep down I find it lacking as there's so much more than wealth to be had. How about, living in a world... some distant future from the everyday-everyday where day-by-day you toil piecing together a vision, one day injecting it into the present, in order to influence a whole new set of social behaviors while also unfolding valuable opportunities. How about, the day of flipping that proverbial switch, releasing this vision out in the wild. How about, the potential of millions interacting with your vision, it becoming a staple part of a users online experiences. There's something undeniably provoking about all this, rush of my life. Wealth, although a welcomed aside pales in comparison. Hell I would even go so far as to say, in a world where sex is constantly peddled as a cure all, let me say it, sex pales in comparison to the feeling I get from being an entrepreneur.
    • hallmark 17y ago
      > sex pales in comparison to the feeling I get from being an entrepreneur. Ha, and they suggest that software developers are naturally weird. http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/18/1557210/Are-Software-Developers-Naturally-Weird http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/18/1557210/Are-Software-... Kidding.. sorta. ;)
• ellyagg 17y ago
  Straw man. Nothing is guaranteed to make you rich. Entrepreneurship certainly has vastly more potential to make you rich. And if we're not talking about being rich strictly, but are implicitly including a quality of life component, well, the information I've seen[1] implies that entrepreneurship is near the income level of other professionals and has a higher sense of well-being. [1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/122960/business-owners-richer-job-types.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/122960/business-owners-richer-job...
  • mrshoe 17y ago
    I think that's just a link bait title which the author only addresses briefly. The rest of the article is actually quite valuable.
  • tptacek 17y ago
    Many more people become rich from careful career planning and money management than do from starting companies. The difference between the approaches isn't the potential, it's the speed and the risk.
    • Devilboy 17y ago
      Yes the #1 way people become millionaires is still via buying real estate.
      • rokhayakebe 17y ago
        That is very misleading. There is a difference between having a million in the bank, and having a home that is worth a million. I would choose the first.
        • tptacek 17y ago
          I think he was implying "and selling real estate". And everyone would choose the completely liquid asset over the one that takes months to sell.
        • 17y ago
• Sthorpe 17y ago
  I really like Eric, saw him down at stanford a couple of weeks ago. Honestly, I am poor. Dirt poor. But I LOVE what I do. I consult to pay the bills. Right now, I'm hyper focused on starting a new business so I haven't been spending a lot of time getting new clients. I had a client that fell on my lap the other day and I was so frustrated with them. The only reason they wanted to start their company was to make a lot of money and get rich. No passion, no iconoclastic idea's. Just, lets do this because it will make money. I would love to see less money grubbing jerks and more passionate people who just love to create stuff. So i'm with Eric in getting the word out. This won't make you rich! Only do this if you love it. *pushes aside pulpit.
  • fuzzmeister 17y ago
    You have most likely already seen this, but Guy Kawasaki often talks about a similar annoyance with people involved in entrepreneurship purely for the money: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3755718939216161559&ei=zb_bSoW2FIO2qQKa8dDjAQ&q=art+of+the+start#4m25s http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3755718939216161559...
• protomyth 17y ago
  For the US dwellers, it does say "the pursuit of happiness". My brother pointed out to me that being rich really isn't the goal. Being able to control your own schedule while paying all the bills is a pretty good life.
  • wynand 17y ago
    That is exactly why I want to become an entrepreneur. I just seem to do badly in a corporate environment.
    • davidu 17y ago
      If you're really successful, you will inevitably be working in a corporate environment, even one of your own creation. Some people make the transition happen really well, some don't.
      • cglee 17y ago
        It also depends on where you are in the corporate machine. As someone else mentioned on HN once, perhaps Gates couldn't even move up in today's Microsoft, but he makes a pretty good CEO.
      • michaelneale 17y ago
        You wouldn't be working in a corporate environment generally for very long (often founders move on) and in any case, it isn't like you are a "regular" employee if you are really successful ;) A lot of things are easy to bear when you know they are temporary - and you don't have the locked in feeling.
  • physcab 17y ago
    Funny...what you described sounds an awful lot like being a grad student. :)
    • kelnos 17y ago
      Hehe, possibly true... but I think a lot of people have more than just "being able to pay the bills" on their list of financial needs. Most of the grad students I know are indeed able to pay their bills, but are also compulsive penny-pinchers and can't (or won't) really live any other way. Going back into academia isn't worth it to me based on that alone.
• joez 17y ago
  I'd echo PG's words in that a startup is about compounding your work life into a few years. Even if your startup fails, you'll get a massive amount of experience in seeing it through. Employers will appreciate all the experience you gained in launching a product.
  • timwiseman 17y ago
    All true, but the question for many isn't about the potential ROI (effectively unlimited), but the expected ROI (for the average startup, it is not much more than that experience you talked about). Is that expected experience substantially more valuable than say grad school which is less stressful?
    • philwelch 17y ago
      "Valuable", in a market sense, means people are willing to pay for it. Apply for the same set of jobs, once with a graduate degree and once with a failed startup under your belt. See how many companies are willing to pay for your services. My hypothesis is that there are disjunct sets of employers who will value one over the other, but the set of employers who value startup experience value it more than the set of employers who value grad school experience value grad school.
      • timwiseman 17y ago
        My suspicion, and only suspicion, is that you are largely right. Of course, I also think it matters how far along you got in the process and waht kind of stories you can tell from it. I suspect that the founders of a company that put out an actual product with real users, hired non-founder employees, and perhaps got VC level funding at one point is much more valuable in the market than someone who filed the papers to officially incorporate but died while still working out of a garage with no non-founder employees and few users.
  • kelnos 17y ago
    Yes, agreed. I just joined a small early stage startup. While I was deciding whether or not to accept their offer, I was thinking, "would I accept this job even if I knew right now that in a year the company will fail and I'll have to find a new job?" The answer to that turned out to be "yes." The pay is better than my old (non-startup) job, and I feel like the experience I'd gain would more than offset the hassle and worry about needing to find a new job. Of course, I don't expect us to fail, but it's nice to take a pessimistic view into account ^_~.
• lionhearted 17y ago
  Major error with this line of thinking: > A more rational career path for money-making is one that rewards effort, in the form of promotions, increased security, salary and status. You trade off a lot if you're getting paid for effort instead of for results. No one wants effort. No one wants a badly burnt steak, not well cooked pie, crummily engineered car, and so on. But people will gladly pay a lot for results. Desiring to get paid despite burning steak ("rewarding effort") is a path to much less wealth than you could make, but even more scary, it's a path to much less happiness. Getting paid while failing to deliver what people wanted destroys your self esteem. Doing interesting work and needing to get it right is engaging and stimulating. Harder, more risky, sure. But much more enjoyable and fulfilling. > Startups, unfortunately, punish effort that doesn’t yield results. Right - no wants to pay for burnt steak. You want to get paid for turning on the grill, regardless of how it comes out? Don't expect to get paid much, or to have a particularly stimulating work life.
  • leelin 17y ago
    All true, but at least I can better predict my ability to output effort than predict my ability to output results, even if I am good at what I do.
    • lionhearted 17y ago
      Definitely true - stability is worth something, especially if you've got a family or just want a life with less stress. But if you don't have serious economic commitments and can handle a little stress, why not freelance after hours for a little while and see how it goes? Can wade in slowly some. If you're willing to focus, you can make 3x, 10x what you'd make salaried if you go self employed. I remember reading somewhere that the average employee gets something like 2.5 productive hours of work done every 8 hour day: The rest is shuffling papers, meetings, chatting, goofing off online. If you can focus intensely for 5-6 hours a day, you can make a lot more money and have a more free, stimulating, enjoyable life. It is legitimately more intense and stressful, but I'd recommend almost anyone take a crack at it. The rewards are very, very good, definitely worth taking a year or two to see if it suits you. And I mean, why not give it a try? It's huge for you if it works out, and employers more and more are respecting the guy coming back to industry after working for himself for a while.
• rokhayakebe 17y ago
  There we go again. If anyone understand the mind of an entrepreneur, they will stop trying to tell them to do anything other than what they are doing. If you want to help entrepreneurs, help them refine their ideas, execute against them, and get closer to success. Anything else is a waste of your time.
• deleted 17y ago
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• alexitosrv 17y ago
  Startups, unfortunately, punish effort that doesn’t yield results. In fact, the biggest source of waste in a startup is building something nobody wants. While in an academic R&D lab, creation for creation’s sake will often get you praise, in a startup, it will often put you out of business. The best articulation of why I'm fond of entrepreneurship world instead of academic world...
  • martincmartin 17y ago
    To succeed in academia, you need to build things that please your customer, its just that your customer is a funding agency and/or your community. There are many, many publications that nobody sites, which is the equivalent of products nobody buys.
  • kelnos 17y ago
    Yes, thank you! That was exactly my reaction. I don't believe that you should reward hard work for hard work's sake alone. You should reward purposeful hard work that yields beneficial results.
• benofsky 17y ago
  It may be a myth upon people who are not entrepreneurs but I'm pretty certain money is not what drives entrepreneurs rather being successful, doing what you love, etc.
• maxer 17y ago
  Truth: Entrepreneurship leads to contentment
• danbmil99 17y ago
  Excellent article. Not exactly a myth, but the wrong goal. Striving to maximize financial return is simply not the sort of motivation that is most likely to result in a successful startup.
• dsplittgerber 17y ago
  He doesn't say the participants at seedcamp wanted to get rich. He doesn't name any sources for such a "myth" existing. The way I see it, people value entrepreneurship for a whole bunch of reasons, guaranteed financial success most certainly NOT being amonst those. He wants to write an article on his perceptions, fine. He just doesn't base it in reality, though.
  • wpietri 17y ago
    I suspect he doesn't feel the need to justify it because it's a commonplace in his world. It sure is in mine. This was especially problematic during the dot-com bubble. This town filled up with MBA-holding locusts and greasily slick smooth talkers. They were in it for the money, and nothing else. Of course, most of their businesses failed, and they went off to plague somebody else. Good riddance, I say. The problem still continues, though, and it's not limited to high tech. The big MLM scams are funded mainly through taking money from idiots who believe that they'll quickly get rich through this exciting new turnkey business opportunity, even though they've gotten totally screwed on the last three. You want some data points, go to an Herbalife convention.
• CSunday 17y ago
  This article doesn't make much sense, to be honest... But anyways if you ask me, entrepreneurship is about becoming successful, rather than rich, because once you are successful, the money will naturally come -- at least you'll love what you do, and not starve while doing it :)