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Comment by dtran | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone done a survey of the family socio-economic status of startup founders and early employees? I'd be curious to see how many founders/early employees are from low-income families, whether their parents graduated college, etc. If not, I'd love to create one.

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There is this: http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2010/05/the-anat...

"More than 90 percent of the entrepreneurs came from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds"

I'd like to offer a potential explanation of this: Middle and upper-lower-class individuals have the most to gain by doing things on their own.

* An upper-lower-class or middle class child will not have the same burdens and problems as a lower-class individual as describes in this post. They likely have just enough of a support system to be able to make it on their own.

* An upper-lower-class or middle class child will NOT be able to get into a great college with scholarships. They will likely choose a safer route, like a cheaper state school. This makes them less desirable to employers, so the "safe" route doesn't exist.

Yep this is exactly it I believe. I come from a very middle class background. My dad is mechanic and my mom is a teacher. If I wanted to move up in the world this is the best route. I had neither the business connections nor the ability to afford an Ivy League school. That being said, I was lucky enough to go to a state school and for my parents to support me for about 6 months while I got my company making revenue. So your 2 conditions seem to hold true.

My mom works in education and my parents are divorced, so I bought a degree from a lower-tier state school with loans. I still had to list both parents on my FAFSA and couldn't qualify for any need-based anything.

Basically I ended up paying more for a less valuable piece of paper. Because my chosen school sucked it was really hard to find a job. I'm only where I'm at because I'm lucky, and I don't think many people in my situation would have had similar success.

Thanks-- that's useful: "More than 90 percent of the entrepreneurs came from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds and were well-educated."

I'm curious about the socio-economic background of the parents as well.

My understanding is that there is a very strong correlation between a person's educational and socio-economic attainment and those of their parents. The number that sticks in my head is that parental status accounts for 80%+.

This is an article I read on the topic.

If you are born to parents in the lowest quartile you have ~10% chance of making it into the highest by age 26. For people born in the highest the probability is ~30%.

(and if it was random it would, obviously, be 1/4 = 25%)

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...

But that's moving from the bottom to the top. How about from the bottom to the middle? What percentage never leave their quartile?

On its own, leaving a quartile doesn't say anything about the magnitude of the change, so it's not a very useful measure of anything.

Another problem is that because the distribution is so heavily skewed toward the top (for both income and wealth, but more heavily for wealth), dividing the population into equal groups creates a somewhat misleading picture of mobility. A nonlinear breakdown of classes is more reflective of the distribution. In that case we might ask something like how many people move from the bottom 40% to the top 5%.

This is a very good point, I totally agree!

Although for some questions, e.g. "Can you escape poverty in the US today?" (which could be specified as moving from 1st -> 3rd quartile) this data works.

But, for other types of questions, e.g. "Is extreme wealth mostly hereditary?" you'd need a non-linear breakdown of classes.

be careful because "entrepreneurs" can be people that have to work contractor, part-time work, or the same trade "my father" was in kind of work.

That's always the problem with surveys like these. I started the form, then realized it'd be very difficult for me to group everyone into multi-choice categories for job, background, etc.

This is unfortunately very outdated. (07/08/09)

I would wager that a lot has changed in the last 7 years.

I doubt it. Has access to capital changed? If anything, the trend is towards more concentration.

Cronyism is just a given when it comes to finance and business dealings.

I'd like that survey. The lower class is completely unrepresented in tech. It's been one of the weirdest and hardest things for me to handle personally.

You know what's weird and uncomfortable sometimes? Going to lunch with your co-workers and listening to them talk about the awful problems of their lives, like how they wish their maids could come twice a week instead of every two weeks, and how difficult it is that they have to pay [my salary * 0.5] for their kid's private school. How worried they are about things like the stock market and how high the property taxes on their million dollar homes are. Total culture shock, not coming from money.

My dad returned from combat in WW2 where 80% of his group were casualties and he expected to die in combat. He said he was amused at the triviality of everyday concerns. "What's your problem, you're not going to die tomorrow!"

And really, if you're able-bodied and able-minded and nobody is trying to kill/maim/imprison you, then life is good. I went to retrieve the mail this morning, and was greeted with a bright blue sky, and an eagle sitting on top of a nearby doug fir tree giving me the eye. Pretty damn awesome to be alive.

There are a lot of us out there with similar backgrounds, yet when you tell people that any day that you aren't being shot at, or blown up or starving is a good day, they look at you like you are crazy.

I had to learn to just not share things about my life with coworkers. It's very alienating though.

This is actually a bond that I find I have with many people I know who grew up here in New York and work with mostly transplants (I'm not bashing transplants...).

I know a lot of people across a wide class divide. I've done some interesting stuff and I've also been in scary/dangerous situations that seem normal to me. The times I've mentioned them I've seen people go wide-eyed and get very uncomfortable.

I really hate the fact that I feel like I'm walking on egg shells whenever I'm not talking exclusively about work with them.

I try (not always successfully) the philosophy that any day you can wake up, put yo feets on the ground and get up, is a good day.

My biggest shock was during my first internship during college making $30 / hour at an enterprise software company. For background: I went the community college / go-get-a-degree-in-your-late-20s-route in life, living off nearly minimum wage for many years before going to CC.

The first paycheck comes after two weeks, $1800 after taxes and withholding. I am in awe of how much money I suddenly have in my bank account. My fellow students who were interning instantly started complaining about the tax rate and how they wouldn't be able to afford SF rent and the lease payment on a sports car.

they have to pay [my salary 0.5]*

Learn to do whatever it is they do, then ask for a raise to match. I say this because one of the bad habits I got from my own upbringing was constantly undervaluing myself, and doing exactly this has made a huge difference.

Absolutely, it causes feelings of shame to bubble up from childhood that I didn't expect to feel again as an adult.

I think low-income people who go into tech do not go into start ups. It's a risk. If you fail (very likely), you are back to being poor.

I'm a student and notice that a lot of the other low income students and underrepresented groups (of which I am a part of) in my CS program go straight to "safe" jobs, usually enterprise stuff.

Actually now that I think about it: I work in my university's IT department, helping out with the website. The place is straight out of Office Space, very traditional Java/CMS stuff. It's also incredibly diverse. Blacks and Latinos make up a good portion of the working force and even the higher up/managers. There's a good portion of women as well.

But when I interview at start ups or more "modern" companies it's all white or Asian.

As a hispanic person, I always hate it when people see me as some poker chip that should be used to fulfill some arbitrary quota. We have preferences for where we want to work like everybody else, and our backgrounds/cultures definitely have an influence in that. Is it possible that maybe, perhaps these clean-cut trendy startups just aren't appealing to us?

Personally, I can't see myself working at most of these startups, but it has nothing to do with their constituency (I get along great with those 'white and asian' people!), it's just that usually their vision/direction or products are simply uninteresting to me, and I definitely prefer working at startups to big companies. For example, I would much rather work at a food-oriented startup, than another boring code/SaaS type startup, and I certainly wouldn't touch any fashion startups with a 20ft pole, just purely because of what I'm interested in, having grown up in a latino community. Unfortunately, the types of startups that I am interested in, aren't usually the ones that get all the buzz on techcrunch.

Either way, having 'equal opportunity' shouldn't force those of us with different cultural preferences to meet some arbitrary ideals for 'equal outcomes'.

I was "lucky" in that my parents were so terrible with money that every year around tax time assuming we weren't homeless they'd head into Rent-A-Center and rent a computer for the house. If it weren't for that I never would have been exposed to start ups and programming. I didn't go to a real school, opting instead for some community college because the fear of debt and failure were too real, but the years of hustling, jail breaking peoples iPhones, designing sites for other local hustlers, and reading /. and digg meant I'd been exposed enough to the web that I had good js experience. Lucky twice because JS wasn't nearly as enterprise-y when I started wanting to work at start ups.

I think there is a flipside to this too though. If you're not wealthy, you're less worried about living on start-up income. I think you particularly see this among immigrants who realize how incredibly wealthy even the poor in America are by internatiomal standards. People with this perspective are much more willing to drive an old beat up car and share a room relative to someone who feels pressure to keep up with their wealthy friends and family in the suburbs.

Edit: few people work in start-ups as well, so it is probably easy to run into confirmation bias looking at the people you know in your life

Haha. I knew this was coming. You're putting white and asian in one group and blacks and latinos in another group. What should these groups be called, so we don't have to spell it out each time this distinction is made?

Hey, I didn't mean anything wrong by it, and probably should just have had said something like "there's no diversity". Reason I said that is because many people say SV is diverse because of the Asian population, but IMO even though it is a minority population-wise, I would say they aren't in tech.

I know a number of people from truly lower class backgrounds in tech including some that have built substantial startups. It isn't as though they wear a "lower class" badge so that they are easily identifiable. Nor do they generally talk their lower class background -- when has it ever been socially cool to literally be rural "trailer trash" in America? No one likes to identify as a low status member of society.

A lower class person can hide in plain sight in tech because everyone assumes that if you are in tech you are not lower class, and no one checks your papers at the door. One of the motivations for someone from the lower class going into tech is so that they aren't perceived as lower class. They sure as hell aren't going to draw attention to that fact.

> ...when has it ever been socially cool to literally be rural "trailer trash" in America?

You're the one calling it trailer trash. Even educated poor people often speak in a more genuine and direct way than elite people do. It may sound funny to a fancy person but that doesn't make it trash.

> ...no one checks your papers at the door.

Yes, they do. Every job, startup accelerator, and VC checks your background. Elite VCs fund elite founders. Elite founders hire elite managers. Elite managers hire poor people to do the actual work. The order is maintained.

> Every job, startup accelerator, and VC checks your background.

They check your education, not your family background. Nobody has a clue whether your parents were middle class or lower income.

That may be somewhat true if education was completely or even somewhat disconnected from familial background... are you completely ignoring all the discussion going on here? One major point is that without that background, your resume isn't ever even going to be on the hiring person's desk, much less under their attention.

I'm not saying that education is complete disconnected from familial background. But the latter isn't solely a determinant of the former.

Ricky, for example, has a Stanford degree. No hiring manager will know about his low family income. Pretending that VCs/managers somehow have an invisible ball to peer into an applicant's entire life is completely disingenuous.

Does that surprise you? As far as I know, they are underrepresented in medicine, finance, and law as well.

There is more mobility than most people realize, but it's not like employment approaches anything near a random distribution. Given the potential advantages of being born into a wealthier class (both hereditary and non-hereditary), I would expect to see underrepresentation.

It doesn't surprise me at all. Being in tech usually means starting earlier than medicine, finance or law and if you're poor you likely had less opportunities to own or use computers. Access might be provided through school or libraries but you won't generally have access to installing programming languages or anything.

While it didn't surprise me I'd still like more surveys and insight to exactly how hard it is for the lower class to join the tech and start up booms.

Hey-- feel free to reach out if you need someone to talk to-- david@crowdbooster.com and ricky@crowdbooster.com

That's awesome, thank you!

I'd also be interested in the mappings between this and the universities they came from .

I'm sure there were kids in OP's position that got a 1400 instead of a 1600 and went to SJSU instead, for instance.

Relevant: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159

This is a great idea!

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