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Comment by spectrum1234 | Hacker News Reader

The reason for this is barriers to entry to be a big corporation are getting bigger. (This is the only fundamental truth that the author fails to mention!)

However, the barriers to entry to be an entrepreneur are far far lower. Corporations still compete with each other on innovation but now more than ever this is through buying small and medium sized companies said entrepreneurs have created :)

So, this is neither good nor bad, just a shift in where the competitive opportunities are. Hint, it's getting easier for the little guys to compete.

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No.

Little guys compete with each other to start a niche SaaS app for passive income.

Only CEOs of huge corporations are able to build electric cars and smartphones or process financial transactions.

>Only CEOs of huge corporations are able to ... process financial transactions.

Is that true? Isn't Stripe a counterexample to this?

> So, this is neither good nor bad, just a shift in where the competitive opportunities are.

Many see this shift itself as a bad thing. Instead of having career options in stable companies, most people (who necessarily can't all be founders or early employees in the places you allege are still sources of entrepreneurship) are forced to accept unsatisfactory compensation, benefits, and employment stability -- in return for foosball tables and dog-friendly offices.

I interpret the comments about barrier to entry in exactly this way. If it's easier to "enter" low-status entrepreneurship (e.g. start-ups), but this easiness is offset by a disproportional lessening of the potential upside (especially the stability and security upsides), then it could still be a net loss overall.

It is a means of restructuring the process by which the deployment of capital is used to extract productivity -- a restructuring that transforms the process into even more of a transfer of wealth from poor to rich.

Rate of entrepreneurship in the US has declined, and is overwhelmingly class, race, and sex based. It's borderline sociopathic to assert that it's getting easier for the little guys to compete.

I don't know about that, but it is flat-out psychopatic to claim that the rate of entrepreneurship in the US has declined when it has been increasing faster than ever in the past few years[1].

[1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TIMELY_BDS_ISIC...

> sociopathic ... psychopathic

I don't think either of you understand what those words mean.

Asserting that one's company hit a triple when it was born on third base is self-serving and manipulative.

You seem to be asserting that this is what most "entrepreneurship" is. Can you justify/document that assertion, or should we just take it as merely one person's opinion?

So in other words, on this subject nobody is mistaken, nobody suffers from cognitive dissonance, and all disagreement happens because those who disagree with you are manipulative liars?

Ofc entrepreneurship has gone up since 2011, silly! Gallup has some info on long-term pre-recession trends, which blow the recent slight tick upwards out of the water. http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/180431/american-entrep...

Neither of these things seem 'sociopathic' or 'psychopathic' in any way - maybe 'ignorant' or 'misinformed'?

Further, it is far riskier for the little guys to compete. Big corporations have been externalizing R&D risk to the state and now to entrepreneurs. Most startups fail and when they do, Goldman Sachs isn't picking up the tab, the state and entrepreneurs are.

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