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Comment by blrgeek | Hacker News Reader

Right, entrepreneurship is the only field of human endeavor where amateurs can become the best in the field without any study or training whatsoever. Welcome to the mythologizing of the startup world.

For one counter narrative, you should understand why serial entrepreneurs are more successful, why almost the only correlation with success is how many startups a person has done before.

Another counter point is why there's a PayPal mafia and a whole host of successful founders coming out of specific startups.

Yet another counter point is how successful businesses built by people with experience in the same domain somehow don't get counted as 'startups' because they didn't take 'risk'.

Don't fall for the jargon and hype. Expert entrepreneurs have transferable skills that will reduce your risk of failure. It's your bravado and ego that's failing to recognize the difference.

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Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I happen to agree, especially with your first point. Entrepreneurs learn by doing, the more they do, the more they learn which is what post is talking about. Wouldn't my piece support your point about serial entrepreneurs then?

Yes. Your post goes into the first point about serial entrepreneurs, but fails to see the value of learnable entrepreneurial skills, and the value of coming from a successful startup, or with deep domain expertise.

If you're addressing fresh grads, then telling them doing a startup vs learning about a startup vs working in a startup are of different value, would be better. Even Mark suster and Ben horowitz and Steve blank suggest working in a fast growing startup is very useful before doing your own. So there is a way to learn those skills without risk, with a good salary and some small upside potential. As one of them has it, a time to learn and a time to earn...

I guess I reacted a bit to the language which speaks about taking risk very lightly.

I never said anything about quitting your job to do a startup. Much of what I said could be done while having a full time job. My point was in order to learn you should start executing.

> Right, entrepreneurship is the only field of human endeavor where amateurs can become the best in the field without any study or training whatsoever.

The opposite is true in many cases. For example, I suppose you can't sell medical drugs if you're an amateur without any credentials.

I missed the /sarcasm tag.

Writing off experience on the path to becoming an entrepreneur glorifies the unique challenges of being an entrepreneur, while underplaying the 99% of other work that makes a business successful in the real world.

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