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Comment by lint_roller | Hacker News Reader

I have a very similar story, except I'm on part one. Recent graduate, very modest family, and drank all the Paul G koolaid which got me to jump into the whole scene just to realize I'm mostly surrounded by upper middle class types where there's still risk being taken just not nearly as much. This has taught me to always consider the source of advice more rigorously. I still think he's a great thinker, but some of the advice should come with a disclaimer.

I haven't been turned away from the tech startup world, but I'll be much more calculated if I'm ever to join another one. I also don't plan on staking my career purely in startups and am attracted to bootstrapped business now more than ever.

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The lesson from this is don't drink anyone's kool aid consciously. PG has a huge incentive to wax heroic about the "risk takers" "makers" and "founders"; it's the Silicon Valley cargo cult, and should be compensated against in the mind of the reader. Always be brutally critical of applying the question of qui bono-- always, no exceptions, ever.

PG has little incentive to explicitly qualify ideas that are his foundation (regarding the prerequisites for the above), and frankly it'd kind of break up the nice flow his pieces have anyway if he did. His target audience doesn't want to be told that they started life on second base, and honestly it's quite annoying to have someone tell you so with the intention of taking you down a peg.

> taking you down a peg.

Like, back to first base, say?

Or at the back of the rotation, maybe even playing for the farm team rather than the Show.

>honestly it's quite annoying to have someone tell you so with the intention of taking you down a peg.

This is why a lot of HNers flag articles about privilege, sexism, etc.

Privilege is just secular "original sin".

I bet that line goes over well at the golf course.

But claiming someone has privilege isn't a value judgement on the person, or a sin. Its not claiming they did anything wrong, or that its their fault. I'm not sure why people are so offended when others point out their privilege. Saying someone has privilege is just pointing out the state of the world, it isn't a judgment.

People without food allergies have privilege in that they don't have to constantly worry whether what they eat will kill them. The people with privilege often just don't have to think about or deal with stuff that those without do.

> Saying someone has privilege is just pointing out the state of the world, it isn't a judgment.

It could, in principle, be just a claim about the state of the world; in practice, its quite often an ad hominem to dismiss a position they've taken, and often its that with a side of implicit moral judgement that the position is not only invalid because of the claimed privilege, but also that it is maliciously offered as a defense of that privilege at the expense of the unprivileged.

That's not to say that privilege doesn't exist (it does), or that it doesn't at times blind people to others' experiences (it does), or that it doesn't at times lead to people, consciously or not, defending it at the expense of the unprivileged (it does that, too!)

But to pretend that claims of privilege are non-judgemental is ignoring how they are actually used in practice.

>But claiming someone has privilege isn't a value judgement on the person, or a sin...Saying someone has privilege is just pointing out the state of the world, it isn't a judgment.

That is exactly the same argument that bigots use when they talk about {minorities, poor people, immigrants, LGBT people}. "That person fits into category X, and everyone in category X shares some characteristic Y because they're in that category. I'm just saying that because it's true!" It doesn't matter who that generalization is made about, whether they're the dominant group in society or not. It's still a terrible generalization and an intellectually lazy argument and in and of itself carries a judgement. If you grant that something like "white privilege" or "male privilege" exists (and most people that buy into the concept do) then by that logic a homeless, illiterate white man has more privilege than a black woman millionaire CEO.

>People without food allergies have privilege in that they don't have to constantly worry whether what they eat will kill them.

That's absolute nonsense as well. There exist people without food allergies that have other conditions where they constantly have to worry about what they eat, diabetes being an example. So check your cis-gylcemic privilege you fascist!/s Do you see how ridiculous and divisive that sounds?

Damn man, people really wanted to prove your point.

What do you mean?

Just the two other replies to your comment seemed to be pretty typical HN posts regarding sexism/privilege etc.

"PG has a huge incentive to wax heroic about the "risk takers" "makers" and "founders""

To be sure (in the spirt of NY Times "to be sure" statements) [1] PG (who went to Harvard of course as everyone knows) and others always point out the obligatory risks but tend to do so in a way that I think most people perhaps ignore. More or less a "sure it's risky but" as opposed to "you'd be foolish however there's always a small small chance that..."

[1] That is where they (and others in the media) counter something they are saying with the other point of view typically buried 3 quarters down the page as a qualifier.

PG also went to a no-name public high school at a blue collar steel town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Agree. The risk of having to run back to mummy and daddy with their tail between their legs is no risk at all. I could be quite entrepreneurial if I didn't also have to pay for my apartment and food every month without fail.

But from a broader social standpoint, isn't it a good thing that people who can afford to take risks are the ones taking the risks? It sucks on an individual basis if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't risk failure, but it's not such a bad thing that the affluent are taking larger economic risks than the poor.

It sorta spits at the idea of social mobility ("the american dream") though. The biggest rewards are only really available to those who can take risks like starting a business, and if you restrict that to only those who are already well-off, you remove most chances for the poor to ascend to the higher classes.

This implies that you believe that there is a global elite and there has always been a global elite and that they are all related and there is no way to become a part of that elite.

Because if you say that "if you restrict that to only those who are already well-off", their parents probably weren't or their parents' parents etc.

There are many occupations that really only require hard work and little risk that has big payout.

The end result here is that no, life isn't "fair". But by and large, a person that has the ability to take risk, does and succeeds will create that ability for others to do the same in the future.

> There are many occupations that really only require hard work and little risk that has big payout.

Such as?

Medicine.

You need quite more than just hard work to become a doctor.

This is why a social security net (ie. Welfare state) can actually be good for the economy. In fact, most western countries qualify as 'welfare states' when compared to 3rd world countries.

But this supports the whole idea of a basic income - if everyone is able to live without working, they can take risks such as going to University, starting a business, etc...

A lack of social net prevents risk taking and severly limits mobility, creating a 'have-not' class and keeping them there for the most part.

There isn't that much social mobility, there's plenty of statistics that prove that. The American dream is just that, a dream. Like most dreams, the odds are long. You can reduce those odds, but don't kid yourself that it will be easy.

Maybe so, but there's no point in making the situation worse. If we can make it better, we should.

Do you have those statistics? I'm not trying to be unreasonable. It's just that I've tried looking for this data before, and all I found was that social mobility (in the US) has remained relatively unchanged for about 50 years, and that's probably the best it's ever been.

I think we could do better, but I'm not sure what you are saying is correct, either.

There's a lot out there spinning the same result different ways; but I think that's the general status -- social mobility hasn't changed in the US for decades.

There's rather clearer data that the gap between rich & poor continues to widen in the US, which makes it a bit more bleak that going from poor to rich is still a rough uphill battle.

It's also fairly disheartening when you think of all the things that have changed in the past 50 years, many efforts that should help social mobility. Attempting to stop pervasive lead poisoning, lots of grants and policies to help get poor kids through basic and into higher education, legal and other sorts of efforts against sexism and racism... all kinds of things intended to hopefully make the playing ground more fair for everyone haven't actually moved this particular needle at all.

For a bit more context, also look outside of the US. If you want to live the American dream, you'll have a much better chance in Denmark. Reference here (though I read about it elsewhere a few years ago... can't remember orig src): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

Of the 9 developed countries in that study, only the UK ranked worse than the US.

yeah, the affluent, taking one for the team <3

I would rather see the most able taking the risks, because they'll be the ones most likely to succeed, and we all benefit.

Assigning resources to the most able is, of course, an immensely difficult problem that nobody really knows how to solve. But it should be the goal, and I don't see affluence as a good substitute.

How many people are out there right now with the personal ability to change the world in some large beneficial way, but without the necessary finances? What are the rest of us missing out on because they're stuck working a 9-5 job to pay their rent, while some idiot with money is building Twitter for Cats and talking about how much of a risk taker he is because he's living off $50,000 in savings until the VC money comes in?

No, that's the opposite of how it should be.

In an ideal world would be everyone would be free to take business risks, and customers would reward the ideas that offer a real benefit.

What we have now is a world where hardly anyone is free to take business risks, and the people who are tend to share the same political and social values.

Politically, that makes for caste perpetuation and monoculture - which is the exact opposite of the entrepreneurial mythology.

In some ways it's good, but in other ways it's worse. One noteworthy change in the last few years compared to say 10 to 20 years ago, most startups are either self-funded or funded through incubators of the already rich, unlike pre-2005 or so when regular investors had a chance getting in relatively close to the ground floor (let's ignore that most everyone lost their shirt!)

I think the negative of this is that most of the wealth created in the technology is going to remain in the pockets of those who are already rich and well connected.

I'm increasingly feeling like as our society becomes more technically advanced, it's almost inevitable that the vast majority of wealth is going to flow up to the top 10%.

The refrain of posers everywhere...

You of course are right. Tail between legs is embarrassing but in the end you won't go hungry or homeless.

Problem is in popular culture there are also stories about the 1 out of 1000 guys (just like you) that essentially gambled and came out ahead. Let me say that again. Gambled and won. You hear those all of the time. What you don't hear is about the ones who lost or hit the skids as a result of those chances that they took. Or maybe you do (there are always counter stories floating about) but the shine of the winners typically totally blocks those out.

For example I am sure in response to this thread someone has already mentioned the type of family that Steve Jobs came from.

That's the big fallacy of capitalism. Nobody buy books about the guys who took a risk and lost everything, but everybody buys books about the One Guy who became millionaire after being a drop out.

What you call "popular culture", is just propaganda to make people believe that if they don't became rich is their own fault.

I like what JWZ wrote about the related topics:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...

"I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here."

The whole text is worth reading.

A suggestion for the disclaimer:

*this advice only applies to upper middle class white males based in Silicon Valley(or at least the US), who own trendy startups that have raised some VC funding

You don't have to be a white male to be an upper middle class startup founder.

Yeah but then you typically have to drop out from Stanford.

That still does not make sense.

don't get it all too literally. it's about certain stereotypes.

I know a lot of Blacks, Asians, and Women born into a lot more privilege than I, who exhibit the same behavior as those white male founders who sometimes get described as egotistical/ self absorbed/ "douchey".

I mean, are you trying to claim there are no upper middle class tech scensters who are Black, Asian, or Female? Or do they get a pass for acting exactly like the white male counterpart because they aren't white males?

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