> I think it's fair to recognize the uncomfortable truth that in most startups, rewards for success are distributed according to a power law distribution.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? I'm not sure I understand what exactly you mean by this.
http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf
"The factors that affect the supply of entrepreneurs are important but poorly understood. We study a sample of individuals who choose either to be employees or to run their own businesses. Four conclusions emerge. First, consistent with the existence of borrowing constraints on potential entrepreneurs, we find that the probability of self-employment depends markedly upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift. Second, when directly questioned in interview surveys, potential entrepreneurs say that raising capital is their principal problem. Third, consistent with our theoretical framework's predictions, the self-employed have higher levels of job and life satisfaction than employees. Fourth, childhood personality measurements and psychological test scores are of almost no help in predicting who runs their own business later in life. It is access to start-up capital that matters."
Further into the study:
"Attitude to risk is not the central characteristic that determines who becomes an entrepreneur"
tl;dr "adolescent" study demonstrates risk is a convenient narrative that justifies why some people can have nice things and others can't. Access to capital is what counts.
Just being in the position to ^take risk^, is privilege itself.
It does in a way. Founders eating ramen, working long, odd hours, for an idea that may not pay off at all; Who can walk away from a startup and brush it off as experience. An employee doesn't get that opportunity. An employee also doesn't take the risk. They may never have the opportunity to take these kinds of risks.
More specifically, for what percentage of startups would you consider it fair to say?
Can you show an example of damage done by this sort of "defamation"?
What part of that was not a call to emotion?