There's nothing special about starting a company for sure, but successfully growing one takes a lot of grit.
In most cases, probably 10% or less of the credit belongs to the CEO, though.
If I found a company and directly hire 10 people and act as a day-to-day leader where everyone reports to me, you can say that I had a large impact on everything that happened.
Two years later, when we have 300 people, I'm out of the day-to-day hiring decisions and I'm not directly making all the deals that the company makes, I can still claim to be steering the ship, but I can't claim direct credit for much of what the company does. Sure, it was my initial founding decision that has made all of it possible, but I'd be incapable of being involved in literally everything at a larger scale such that I could take credit for it.
- The New York Times has just written an article about how your company mined user data and sold it in a nefarious way. But this sort of sale is critical to your business model. What do you do?
- You hired a VP of Sales 6 months ago who interviewed better than anyone you have ever met and came with glowing recommendations, but he has missed his quota for 2 quarters. Do you fire him or do you give him some more time?
- A competitor has, completely unexpectedly, launched a similar product as yours but is charging customers half the price. Your CTO doesn't know how they could be turning a profit at such a low cost. They're very quickly eating into your market share. How do you respond?
Obviously these situations would be far more nuanced than these 2 sentence descriptions and obviously you would get all sorts of opinions from employees & advisors but ultimately making these sorts of calls is the CEOs job. Making these decisions well is not easy and it can have a huge impact on the company.
And also a lot of people with "grit" don't amount to anything. They lack networks, capital or the right idea. Or they have something else that they feel is more important than building a startup: a family, work flexibility, or a hobby that consumes them.
Statistically speaking, poorer people can't afford to undertake the same risks, so they can't take advantage of the same opportunities. Once you hit zero, you can't gamble your way back.
Also, immigrants usually do not carry cultural dead weight - once again I refer to Germany. Starting a company is not really popular here, as you will be socially shunned if you fail (even if you not end up bankrupt in the process, but that's another can of worms). Germans are risk-averse to the extreme, immigrants usually not.
Since I'm also German, I would like offer a different reason. I frequently observe people on HN talking about their "side projects", where they build a simple app or website in their spare time, and people are willing to pay a dollar a month or so, which (when summed over maybe 1000 users) makes for a decent secondary income.
When I consider such a model for myself (just as exploratory thought because I don't have a nice side project idea ATM) it quickly devolves into a nightmare where I spend all my free time filling out tax report forms so that the Finanzamt can collect taxes on my maybe 100 euros per month.
Maybe that's a misconception and it's much easier to operate a side business as a one-man show, but that's the mental image in my head, and that's also the main reason why I would be quite reluctant to even consider just a side project.
Most of the people from poor countries I've known in NZ had domestic help and owned property back home.
-trust funds - no
-expensive educations - university, but it's subsidized here so it's cheap. Almost anyone who can use a uni education can get one in western nations now.
-the disposable income and lack of financial responsibilities to be able to work for free for extended periods of time - I earned this working at a corp job and saving 30% of my income for about four years
-friends in industry - no
-investor class connections - no
-shitload of luck - hard to say. Probably yes.
You don't need the above; internal qualities beat these externals every time.
Countless trust fund babies have tried to start companies and done nothing but fritter away Daddy's money.
Anyway entrepreneurship isn't really about tech giants. Most entrepreneurs aren't starting giant tech corporations. They're just normal people trying to start a lawn care company, a plumbing outfit, a local chicken restaurant chain, a barber shop, etc etc. These kinds of businesses actually do have strong growth potential if targeted and run well. It's just that very few of their proprietors have the business acumen or desire to do it. I can name several always-packed local businesses in my town that could grow quite easily, but they just... don't.
The only time one would endeavor to run a massive business rather than a small one is if you invented/patented something or provided a service that can be scaled and you need help to bootstrap it... in which case unless BillG or DonaldT is yer uncle, you're gonna be sucking on some VC's titty anyway... i. e. they own you.
But I'd want to see a world where headlines like "Entrepreneurs are just rich kids" cease to be, because that headline is only created when entrepreneurship is put on a pedestal and is seen as something that is inherently superior to everything else.
People wouldn't feel indignant that it is "unfair that rich kids have an advantage" at the entrepreneurship game (which they absolutely do), if entrepreneurship weren't seen as this holy grail mount Kilimanjaro thing.
It is nothing weird about this really. Higher taxed countries are able to offer better public education and health care which gives the lesser of actually stand a chance of making it.
In the US the system is especially rigged. There is no free school choice, so you are forced to go to the public school in your shitty neighborhood if you are poor, while the rich through never ending donations enjoy schools with abundant resources. And even if the schools were good you would be screwed before you even get in, because the US does not offer quality child care to poor people. Research shows the years before school is the most important for future development.
I live in a poorer area of Oslo, but I could if I wanted to send my kids to the schools in the richest part of town without any extra cost to me. But it isn't really important as school quality is pretty even, through proper public funding rather than relying on private donations. Also we get subsidized child care of a quality that typically only upper middle class buy in the US.
If you don't even the playing field in a persons early years you are not going to see much social mobility.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.ht...
Note the ever larger share of government spending as a percentage of the GDP. This doesn't happen unless taxes, in one way or another, go up.
So you want successful entrepreneurs to be poor? It's only seen as a holy grail because it allows for tremendous fiscal success.