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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.

I bet if you tell me only these three things, I'll have a more accurate prediction of which startups will succeed:

* Founder's parents' income

* Founder's parents' education level

* Number of people with over $1M liquid assets that founder knows or has "social access" to

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> * Founder's parents' income

I find this to be one of the biggest indicators. I have friends whose parents are extremely wealthy and they tried all sorts of random careers before finally settling on something. For them there was zero real risk since they always had their parents to fall back on. One's dad even told him to come up with a business idea and he would fund it and help him make it happen. Instead he goofed around for awhile, before simply going back to school.

Personally, I'm more irked at potential wasted than jealous. I have no one to fall back on, and that has made me fiercely independent, but also very risk conscious. The good thing is that it is easier than every to bootstrap ideas with minimal time.

This is a good argument for a basic income, combined with free healthcare and higher education.

I suspect that lowering the risk of entrepreneurship could unlock enormous innovation potential for society.

Two thirds of the above seem to exist in Denmark (and a few other European countries) with no visible improvements to the entrepreneurial scene (I struggle to come up with a Danish startup success story that's been founded in the last decade or two).

They're there if you just do a little Googling. Unity Technologies, SteelSeries, Zendesk come to mind.

I hate to bring politics into this, but that is why I want to see more government support via healthcare or maybe even a guaranteed living wage. That would allow the floor to not completely destroy you and allow you to take on more risk. It's not a good thing for society if only people from wealth can afford to take risk.

When Silicon Valley talks about "diversity" it is often ethnicity or gender, but diversity of economic background is also important.

Oh, so the secret to success is hard work?! Damn it! I've been such an imbecile over the past 6 years - If I had worked 8 days per week (instead of my usual 7 days), I would have succeeded for sure by now! I guess I'm too lazy.

I really need to get myself a mentor like Marissa Mayer so I can learn about work ethics.

Marissa Mayer has got to be one of the most tone-deaf, out of touch people in the entire valley.

She gets away with it because she's a woman. Any other man would have been steamrolled into oblivion by now.

Yes, she doesn't understand that it's not because they're working hard that they succeed. They succeed because they're part of an incubator owned by her husband.

If she thinks the odds are tough in her husband's incubator, wait till she sees how tough it is OUTSIDE of it. I mean it's tough for me not living in SF but I imagine it would be even tougher in places like China - People there probably drive themselves to insanity in the pursuit of success.

If she divorced her husband, the whole incubator (and all startups within) would probably go bankrupt within one year.

That quote also begs the question: if that's the case, why didn't your acquisition efforts pan out?

Woof. Surely there is some in between here. I'm not sure if this was intentional but I don't see why hard work on the part of early startup employees needs to be diminished.

But most startups have hard working early employees - not just the successful ones. Focusing on hard work seems close to a just world fallacy. Ask a billionaire if they got there via hard work. Ask a hard worker if they've got a billion dollars.

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