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Comment by rdlecler1 | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar experience starting life with opportunity debt. Single parent family whose mother had no high school education. Have ADD and dyslexia, moved around a lot with a good part my life in subsidized housing, and never graduated from high school. No one teaches you the basics, so that when you do start coming into your own and taking control of your own life you are so incredibly behind your peers socially, politically, and intellectually. I eventually went to community college as a mature student, eventually made my way to university, did a masters and then a PhD at Yale. Through it all I was always one or two steps behind and so many opportunities were missed because I didn't have money. Similarly, now as an entrepreneur I find myself being a little more conservative because you've been through a lot of bad times without a safety net.

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The main story, this comment, and many other user comments are really interesting and human. Would love to see someone compile a series of them, HONY style. These stories don't get talked about enough in the startup world.

Agreed. Wrote my story below. Not sure how ranking works on hacker news, it towards the bottom. Wish someone compiles these.

Sorry for my ignorance but what's "HONY" style?

I think "Humans of New York" http://www.humansofnewyork.com/

Yes that's the one - pretty amazing stuff.

I feel like the majority of people make the mistake of reflecting on themselves and saying "if only I had this", or "if only I wasn't disadvantaged in this way"... In reality, everyone is disadvantaged in some way, and I can guarantee you that the successful people had a lot of disadvantages and setbacks. You shouldn't dwindle on what you don't have, but rather on what you do have. Successful people don't wait for the stars to align to do what they want. Safety and security is NEVER guaranteed, and if you want to be successful, you must understand this and risk it anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktlTxC4QG8g

Are you seriously saying that everyone's disadvantages are the same? Wow.

Easily. If someone comes from a rich family it's in a way harder for him to build a startup: he will not belong to the demographic of 90%+ potential users of any startup, and it will be hard for him to understand what they want and how to pitch it to them, same thing about employees - it will be hard to lead and motivate people not understanding what the people who need to work to pay their bills feel. This is my personal experience, while i am not rich in the 'first world' sense, when i lived in a small provincial town in Russia 9 years ago i was rich in a relative sense - if you define rich as '1%'. My attempt to build a catering business failed miserably because of these items. Programming - where my clients are of same demographic as myself - works way better.

A rich person can throw money at this problem or at least has the financial and temporal capacity to research it and gain an academic understanding. I know the conventional wisdom is to build something that you would use yourself, but towards the later stages of most b2b companies--especially ones that deal with enterprise customers--the customer is just as alien to anyone as poor people are to you. This is such a tiny issue compared to being poor.

Seriously. "I am rich so I don't know how to make a vehicle to make even more money" is so transformatively different from "I grew up without enough opportunities to know how to function in polite (white) society" that my jaw bunched reading it.

This industry makes me profoundly sad sometimes. Often.

Making more money out of existing money is not a startup. It's an investment. Basically a reverse to startup.

I am morbidly curious what you think the point of a startup is if not to transform existing money into more money. Or what you think investors do with regard to those startups.

A startup is about using other people's money as a leverage for your idea/work. An investment is about being on the other side.

A rich guy who wants to make more money in the tech field will be better off doing angel investing, literally getting on the other side of the counter with startup founders.

After all, capital isn't hard to come by these days. Even outside of the Valley. I have raised (and sadly, burned uselessly) money and it was no way hard. So the factor of having money doesn't mean much. Apart from that, a rich guy will have some advantages (self-confidence, ability to take risks, good initial network) and some disadvantages. Among these are poor understanding of audience for most kinds of ideas, pressure from high status relatives ('startups are hipster toys, you have to go to business school'), high opportunity costs. If we look at successful startup founders, very few come from rich families. Also, having to raise outside money provides a reality check, something which a rich kid will code using his own money has a higher chance to become just a toy - facing investors provides validation and feedback you can't ignore. Raising money is something people think is hard, and it's no way fun to do, so they avoid it whenever they can, so someone who doesn't need it will probably not do it. Which leaves him all alone with his vision...

I think he's point is that there are also disadvantages of growing up under high income (of course it depends on parenting too). Too spoiled, cannot relate to ordinary people, etc.

I seem to remember that many entrepreneurs are born to upper middle class parents.

Not spoiled enough that they cannot work, but still fortunate to have a safe upbringing and be risk tolerant.

(I do agree with you that people are born with very different prospects depending (among other things) on parents social-economic status)

Wealth is not a disadvantage. Period.

The point you seem to be missing is that relative wealth is not a trump card that erases all opposition magically.

Getting spoiled as a child can be definitely be a disadvantage later in life :)

It's called the Law of Averages. It's a type of magical thinking.

I'm not talking about reflection at all. AS you are going through your life you are very aware of the advantages other may have. When I was going to University I also had to 30 hours a week. While friends from wealthier families could spend their extra efforts studying. In the summer, I couldn't quit my crappy job to take an internship because I needed that job in the fall. And on holidays, while everyone is getting a vacation to decompress and battle burn out, I was working.

Had to work 30 hrs a week? So did I. But I look at that as a major advantage. The experience I acquired as well as the 'adulting' life skills gave me an incredible headstart over my peers, who think I was 'born lucky' to have those skills.

But of course your experiences and hardships shaped who you are as a person too.

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