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Comment by BoiledCabbage | Hacker News Reader

> I found most serious people succeed in business. It is not that hard to become a millionaire, way easier than being a salaried person

This is the trouble with discussions on this topic. Everytome Survivorship bias comes up, someone provides "counter evidence" which happens to be a picture perfect example of survivorship bias.

Most serious people don't succeed in business. It is hard to become a millionaire. Way more people with the exact traits you'd describe as being what's needed for success have failed than succeeded.

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It's far easier to say "they weren't successful because they didn't try hard enough". You can move the goalposts on "serious" any time contrasting examples come up.

It's not that far from victim blaming, even if not intentional.

Way more people with the exact traits you'd describe as being what's needed for success have failed than succeeded.

Do you have proof of that assertion?

I'd tend to largely agree with the OP, although I think he's overstating the point a bit. It's certainly not a great deal harder to get to the millionaire point as an entrepreneur than as a conventional salaried worker - assuming you have the appropriate character traits. If you're a self-starter with a fair amount of willpower and the ability to effectively learn, lifestyle businesses (as distinct from unicorns) are not massively tricky to grow. They're not easy, and there's definitely a learning curve, but it's on the "doable" end of the scale.

(Background: I've built a few, and I teach other people to build them.)

Addendum: we should probably also start by defining "failed" here. If you mean "way more people's first businesses fail than succeed", I'd agree with you, absolutely. If you mean "way more people have started more than 8 businesses following best practice and have had zero successes than have had any success", I'm much more skeptical. It's an axiom - even in the talks by famous successful people mentioned in the comic - that you generally need a few attempts to get the hang of launching and running anything.

Just take a look at the average YC batch. If anyone is set up to succeed, it is those guys with coaching, resources, and connections. Most of them don't become wildly successful and are only successful in any sense because of the ability to pivot, learn lessons, etc. (see Schwartz's Infogami -> Reddit transition). Or check out small business failure rates. More anecdotally and less scientifically, watch retail/food locations which have business after business after business open in them.

A successful lifestyle business takes a lot of learned knowledge, and by virtue of building a single one you've had more success than most. Just beating the odds on one was your survival, once you did that you had a lot of advantages.

Bigger serial entrepreneurs often have similar patterns. One success allow you to make another which allows you to make another, all with varying degrees of success and with failure effectively subsidized. See Mark Cuban, Ev Williams, Pewter Thiel.

YC companies are, to the best of my knowledge, mostly looking for unicorn-style plays. That's a very different game to a lifestyle business, and one where I would agree 100% that the failure rate is extremely high.

Small business failure rates: well, for starters, the usually-quoted numbers have been updated as of late. A quick Google shows that most sources are converging on around a 60% success rate for small businesses at the moment. (I think that's actually unrealistically high - I'd estimate more like 40% and guess they aren't accurately polling online businesses, but hey.)

Secondly, there's a significant difference between small business failure rates and small businessperson failure rates. As I mentioned above, most people's first businesses will fail. That will obviously skew the numbers in favour of failure: indeed, given that it's surprising the survival rates are as high as they are.

You're correct that it's (sometimes) easier to build a successful business after you've already built one. However, you don't mention the secondary point, which is that it's also much easier to build a successful business after you've already tried really hard and failed at one.

> there's a significant difference between small business failure rates and small businessperson failure rates

Most people can not afford a failed business. If you are looking at repeated tries, you are taking a huge amount of survivorship bias already.

Depends on the business. Not everything requires huge or even significant initial outlay.

For example, infoproducts (or any kind of digital product) are very cheap to start up. They take time, but not necessarily a lot of money.

The thing is, time is money. Leisure time is one privilege of the rich, or lucky, which leads to unfair compounding advantages (like philosophy as well). "Normal" people (as in, if you selected them at random) don't have the time to learn the special skills required and also invest the time to develop the very specific type of product you are talking about. So, in order to start a business, you need to have a break. It can be getting lucky with your job, a windfall, or just gambling some precious savings or time onto your idea. And then, most of the time, it fails, and most people cannot afford to retry. Those that manage anyway are the exception, not the rule

You're forgetting also that a "serious person" is probably classified by their success at their business.

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