Why Entrepreneurs Start Companies Rather Than Join Them
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“More often than not, she relies on charts, graphs
and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a
decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating
people … At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in
on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a
list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy
League schools, … One candidate got a C in macroeconomics.
“That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says.
“Good students are good at all things.”
I've mostly found them to be negative signals. I blind applications for education now.
It leaves no room for externalities and circumstance, and assumes the individual had all needs met, perfectly, at all times.
Facts are facts, even if someone came up short once or twice. Maybe blame is irrelevant, and excuses aren't a substitute for productivity, but simply put, that's not how you measure humans, and any human knows that.
If one has an excess of qualified candidates, this isn't an issue. Wasting too much time on the decision becomes the biggest risk.
After all if you have enough candidates, you can choose to only hire clones if the founders. And completely miss out on the benefits of diverse experiences bringing out creativity.
Google is well known, as are many other companies, to have the upper echelons of engineering filled with Stanford grads (and faculty), with their idea of diversity being the occasional Berkeley faculty member that's well liked there. (other companies, of course, have different universities they do this with, although Stanford certainly seems to have more than it's fair share)
So on the plus side, it's not racist. On the down side ...
Or you could choose to hire people who aren't clones. It's not like you're stuck with Hobb's Choice when you have a glut of options
Google (and other's) strategy is to optimize for precision rather than recall or accuracy, which is the optimal strategy when you receive several orders more candidates than you are capable or willing to hire.
To maximize precision, you need to minimize Type 1 errors (False Positives), and you don't really care about Type 2 errors at all (False Negatives, e.g. throwing the baby out with the bath water).
This is of course if you treat people like data points, which seems more and more common (and explicit) with larger companies.
But they do. Look at all the people trying to pretend like they have problems that require Google's infrastructure instead of just three machines with a shitload of memory and some redundant networking hardware.
If you don't react to the fact that other people are copying your actions then your moral compass is broken.
And if company A can have the luxury of copying Google and ignoring perfectly capable candidates because they had a C+ in one exam, what is the issue? There is then company B that cannot afford not to have that candidate recruited and she might turn out great.
At the end of the day, GPA is an imperfect ordering of candidates by quality, but it is such an ordering, and companies with the sweetest offer (money, prestige) will be able to get the best candidates, be that they look at GPA or not.
And it is not as if someone with a C+ is banished from the workforce - just from Google and the other companies that can afford to be so exquisite.
The other problem is sameness bias. I posit that those false negatives are disproportionately folks that are underrepresented, demographically. Therefore, this approach has concerning externalities.
Because most companies don't (and generally shouldn't) operate like pro football teams. "You've had a couple bad games; we're cutting you. Sorry it's just business." Most (though of course not all) people think that once you've hired someone, you should really try to make things work. Both because of the costs associated with someone getting up to speed at a company and because of the personal cost to the person being fired. Different companies have different philosophies of course.
If you really screwed up, make that choice soon. In the more common borderline case, that person is still giving you decent value, so it's not a total loss, even if you invest effort in trying to coach them up to your high bar.
Warm intros from an entity that just rejected you would be a terrible signal.
It's not just google though, this is fairly widespread in America, and I bet many of these companies that practice hiring like that are either doing it because thats what everyone else has done (without realizing the reasons or not articulating the real ones), or because taking those kinds of candidates means not only do you get a potentially useful in their job employee, but you get access to another kind of elite-social capital.
People ignore the extent to which the signals they're using as input are simply correlated with the signals some previous gatekeeper used. Therefore, they vastly underestimate how much a person's resume is "all signal".
I'm a great case in point. At some point, scholarships I had earned became the justification for giving me more scholarships. Much of my early adult life was spent compiling signals and statuses. I absolutely tried to develop real capabilities along the way, but to say my "impressive" resume indicated significant real world value created outside my own life probably wasn't true until about age 30.
When I was a hiring manager, I tried to evaluate people on what they accomplished relative to what they were given.
Not a very high pass rate on that class.
If she doesn't have enough "good student" applications (according to her definition of "good student") in her company, which criteria will she relax? And even if she does have a large enough pool of "good student" applicants, how would she select one among them?
This is an unfounded and dangerous belief. Skills do not necessarily transfer. Ben Carson, for example, is by all accounts the most talented neurosurgeon to ever live. He doesn't give the impression of being qualified as a federal administrator. Another example -- back in school we had a physics Nobel Laureate who decided he was a biologist. Despite all indications to the contrary he was taken seriously in this endeavor.
They only one close to a real polymath I know started a company when young sold it out for $$ at a young age then decided to get a Phd in music - after a bad accident whist in traction taught himself programming - oh and was also a session musician and played on top 10 hits
It's shocking because making a statement like that seems almost incompatible with being an intelligent person. If that quote isn't misrepresenting her beliefs, it really raises quite a number of questions.
Perhaps Ms. Mayer is most comfortable hiring such people.
“More often than not, she relies on charts, graphs
and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a
decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating
people …”
If you're going by grades, then odds are what you're really selecting for is students who are good at the things they felt safe taking, not those who challenged themselves.
On the opposite side, I had colleagues who passed some courses with flying colors (sometimes going so far as to being exempt from taking the final test due to their prowess during the semester), but failed other, unrelated courses, because they simply didn't care.
From my experience, I have zero faith in grades.
I suspect for a good proportion of entrepreneurs, the financial risks are low - it's either money you can afford to lose, or it's someone else's money, or both - the professional risk is low because a lot of companies will still hire you if you fail, and the personal risks are unknown and/or ignored.
Being a corporate employee is actually riskier. You can be fired at will with little or no safety net, for reasons that have nothing to do with your own professional skills or mistakes.
I also feel you could factor opportunity into the equation. That is, I might accept less autonomy for more opportunity.
And of course there's timing. Life is funny like that.
It was maybe 1/3rd of what I’d get from an established company, but still enough to pay mortgage and provide for a family of 3.
Where do you think that seed capital goes? To pay the founders and whoever they manage to hire.
If "maybe 1/3rd of what I’d get from an established company" was enough to pay mortgage and provide for a family of 3, then in the "not doing a startup" scenario you'd have earned&saved that money, and you effectively lose it if your startup doesn't work out.
Many bootstrapped founders go years paying themselves massively below market to fuel the rocket ship so to speak.
Would you make the same choice if the money came from your own savings or those of close friends and family?
No matter how much you have left, the consideration of whether it's a good deal or not should include that choice to "spend" that amount of (potential) money on the startup versus whatever you would have done with that money otherwise. If you wouldn't have done anything, then there's choice of spending a few years on the startup versus having, say, half a million of savings for retirement.
All of the time I have spent trying to build software at large, stable, safe companies has been wasted. Most of the time I have spent trying to build software at startups has been wasted, too. That's life in a field as young and uncertain as ours: most of what you do will turn out to be a waste of time.
So, what's that time actually worth? Same as what that software is actually worth: nothing, usually.
For some, the risk/independence trade-off doesn't stop at "VC's bitch".
A normal person looks at a problem, see the risks, can't see how to get around them, and backs down.
An entrepreneur see the same problem, the same risks, identifies possible ways to mitigate the risks, and then attacks.
Entrepreneurs as risk takes is myth, or at least a false label.
The deductive 'type' can usually be a very good student and academic, but not so great as a practitioner. They can be very reliable within a very structured environment.
The inductive 'type' is usually better at doing things and learning from these and getting an intuition for how they work. They are not good at 'following' ideas and usual make horrible students and employees. They are pretty good at adapting in a more chaotic environment.
So the problem in tech (interviews)seems to me that the 'deductive types' get the best scores and signal themselves as being the 'brightest'. However in reality what you want in industry are 'doers' such as the 'inductive' type people ... but they are the ones failing at your ridiculous tests/puzzle questions.
Ideally a person should balance between the 2 modes (inductive and deductive) and be a master at almost everything.
He uses "credentials" the way "resume" is used here. Large companies allocate compensation & power based on credentials, including those you get in-company like seniority and job title. Startups let you succeed and fail based on performance instead of this poxy proxy for it. He goes in depth into the "grades problem" that Mayer seems to exemplify and several commenters here brought up.
I think pg was optimistic about this topic in 2008, and this article relates to his larger vision of a "high-resolution" economy where un-credentialed entrepreneurship plays a larger role, and corporate-bureaucratic credentialism plays a smaller one.
We'll soon have 3-5 trillion dollar companies (unicorn-eating dragons, technically). They're less "old fashioned" in their credentialism, but they're credentialist nonetheless.
I'm with Paul though, we need to figure out ways of having the economy that is less abstract.
Bob's salary is $90k a year. Phew; income inequality, solved.
(The current standard in the United States is that most of the above fringe benefits would result in taxable income to the employee. This is close to the current formal rule in Japan, which adopted guidance very similar to the US' on about a 25 year lag, but the substantial give-and-take between tax authorities and employers/taxpayers makes the actual practice in Japan substantially more varied than in the US, including among firms which would consider themselves enthusiastically complying with the rules.)
How does it work ? One pays "proper" tax on a nice income they pay themselves indirectly (but 1/3 or less of their real pay) and then invest it in something that's some form of capital replacement business (buy something - rent it out) and grow that business all their career, and of course use it for perks, like free dinners, vacations, health care, education, hotels, cleaning service, ... There's even the more blatant ways to get untaxed pay. For instance renting your own house (you put an office room in your mansion, then "rent" it to your own company for a very nice rent. Untaxed, and legal)
For tax purposes, of course, those aren't free dinners. Those are "sales negotiations", which are indeed also conducted in expensive restaurants. "Company conferences", not vacations. As for additional healthcare, that receives special tax treatment by default.
Company cars (aside from being a necessity. You're socially judged in Germany by the car you drive. You want "senior consultant" ? Don't arrive in a Renault, or generally any car under $50k. Hell I know people who hack this system by using rentals, removing the stickers and using those to go interview). Anyway company cars are untaxed (0%) as long as their "primary use" is company business. Wanna bet how often that is true for higher pay individuals ?
Oh and I've actually walked into the general management building of Deutsche Bank. I guarantee not one of the managers is paying a dime in tax on company perks, and yet ... that building is a palace. You can get free massages there. There's an exquisite restaurant (10 euro per meal). It's the best museum of German art in existence, by a HUGE margin, it's got sleeping rooms (which should be understood to be a free hotel service, because that's what they are), and of course, every business partner or "business partner" ... can be given access, again, for free. And all this service, for free, in the dead center of the city. Hell, the free parking alone is worth 500 euro per month.
Can we please stop with the idea that Europe is somehow a more egalitarian place than the US ? It's not. Also no European business will be caught dead paying half the salary you get in Colorado to a software engineer (you can get comparable to Colorado as a consultant with maximum "tax hacking" though, still nowhere near the valley). Lastly, at least in my experience, European companies are a lot less meritocratic than US ones (not that I'm seriously claiming there isn't a healthy dose of nepotism/favoritism in the US, but it doesn't tend to be 90%+ of the company, whereas that is very common in the EU).
Europe, generally, is more egalitarian. Most of the countries operate on social democracies. Many countries have free health care. I would also like to point out countries in the EU are different. They're not like states in the US, they're very different.
The US has people without access to water. Huge trailer parks. Much higher rates of homelessness. Worse income equality. Smaller social welfare programs.
Whatever your personal experience of walking into a bank is, it doesn't matter and it doesn't make you right.
It's also a bit silly to point at a bank, which are notorious in all countries.
The software salary thing is very odd thing to point at too, the US has a disproportionate amount of the internet companies which is heavily inflating your software salaries due to demand.
If you rent out the office in your house to your own company for a too high price they will investigate you for "verdeckte Gewinnausschüttung".
There are of course margins to play with in which you can probably hide a lot of money, but generally this is tax evasion
(In the US; Europe has many places with wealth taxes.)
As we all know today from history, there was lifestyle inequality in the cases where there was supposedly income equality.
The 1986 tax reform level most of that out.
> the dream of making real money, enough to buy our freedom from the rat race and live life on our own terms
Quoting Steve quoting the paper's conclusion:
> The authors’ conclusion — Entrepreneurs think they are better than their resumes show and realize they can make more money by going it alone. And in most cases, they are right.
They'd all ask, "Why would I hire you if you're just going to leave and do another startup?".
Even in San Francisco, which was more surprising than in the midwest.
What about Gmail and Chrome?
Arguably, YouTube, Android, Maps and Double Clicks have much more impressive market shares and revenue impact than Chrome and Gmail.
Some examples of failed innovation at Google are Wave, Allo, Chat, Plus, etc. Having worked at Google, I can count way more product failures than successes that originated internally.
Some of the successful acquisitions (YouTube, Waze) were made at a time when they were already popular and had traction. YouTube wasn't the only video sharing site around at the time (there was even Google Video[1]) but it was obviously the most well-liked.
I know that you might think offering more storage for the same product is not innovative, but here's the thing: Yahoo (pretty much the largest competitor at that time) offered an email service with 4 MB of storage.
4 MB.
Yet business formation in the US is near a forty year low: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea...
Tell me about "the entrepreneur who never started a company".
Within an established organisation, even great ones, getting things done involves often involves internal machinations - "buy in" etc. The best people at large companies are experts at this.
As an entrepreneur, this skill helps make a sale, or raise funds. But its directly linked to the problem you are solving. Its "how do I make a thing that does X" VS "how do I make this thing do X".
Its purer. Its more interesting. Its easier to romanticise - and easier to pass that feeling on. Its also liberating to have complete freedom (for awhile!) and no-one to blame but yourself.
Those aren't really signaled by asking coding questions either.
Its always a shock to colleagues when they ask where I went to college and my response is that I'm still on my gap year that started 15 years ago. When I go into the details of what happened throughout that period the bias towards college education disappears.
And the paper is correct, I fully understand that my skills on offer are on par or better than what any C-level or senior exec can offer, but I only realized this after a few years of interacting and working with these people.
I've started several companies, and the reason was the same each time, I believed there was a market for an idea from which I could make money. Those other reasons never came into play. I suppose that starting a bussiness has different reasons for people who are already unhappy with their lives, but starting a business really shouldn't be undertaken to minimize stress and the number of working hours.
People don't 'choose' to be entrepreneurs - Choosing to be an entrepreneur is usually the first step but it doesn't make you an entrepreneur. It can take decades to reach the point where you can become one.
I've been trying for 10 years and I'm now only partially an entrepreneur in the sense that I earn a decent amount of passive income from a side business but I'm still also an 'employee' because I still have a day job too.
It takes a long time to build up the network that you need to become an entrepreneur.
In fact, many founders start businesses in industries and niches that, at first, they might have little, to no, connection to.
If you think a network is critical, probably the most effective (time-wise, maybe not so much cost-wise) way to acquire one is to go get an MBA or gain employment in a professional services firm (consulting, banking, accounting, law, etc.) that works in that industry.
Everyone around me has a bunch of rent houses while they work normal jobs to pay everything off. Hell, my neighbor has 15 or so homes and lives in Europe most the year and has since the early 1990s.
Lots of different types of entrepreneurs and avenues to success. Capital is the key in my experience.
People buy my things because I fill a need. I don't know a single person in real life who uses my products or has similar needs.
No wonder Yahoo failed.
https://www.google.com/search?q=define+entrepreneur
> a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.
1)Be born in a country that's rich with local talent that you can hire. Or have the ability to move to such a country.
2)Be free of debt, either from student loans or mortgage
3)Have affluent friends or families(the paper rightly notes that most early funding comes from friends and family) - so affluent that they are willing to invest in something they know will possibly fail, as most startups do.
4)Be the right age - if you're starting a family or paying off a mortgage, it would be completely irrational to abandon a stable job.
When you consider all this, there are perhaps a few hundred thousand people for whom it would be wise to become an entrepreneur - and by this I don't mean a local store, but with ambitions to scale up.
All these factors could explain the charecteristics: Immigrants from Asia and Europe tend to be richer than the average population there much more educated. They are young and largely free of undergraduate debt. Similarly, people who grow up in affluent families(relative to the median family) probably already have seed money, fall-back options and security that failure doesn't mean homelessness. Not everyone has that luxury.
Looking at the most popular entrepreneurs in the world - Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and Spiegel all grew up in very rich homes, while Jobs grew up right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Kalncik lived 3 years without a salary and moved into his parents house for a long time.
1) Australia, but we started it in Canada.
2) Again true, lots of friends opted to buy houses etc, but i felt it was going to limit me so i avoided this form of debt, and thankfully so as servicing it would have probably prevented me from starting the company.
3) Affluent co-founders in my case.
4) I was 24. Just old enough to know enough, young enough to be dumb enough to try + have the freedom to try.
I'd also add a 5th) You need a solid chunk of savings (Ideally a year or two worth). I dropped my income by 76% to work on the startup and saw no increase from pre-startup income for a while thereafter. But 6 years later my salary income (forget the buyout portion of money) was up 1191% from where it was before i left my job.
You will get an infinitely higher return on reinvesting money in yourself than putting up a deposit to purchase a pile of bricks.
$50k in the bank might give you 5 shots at starting a $100-200-300k a year business.
You'll realise it's almost always easier to make money from a successful business (no potential constraint on earnings if you solve a large enough problem) than it is working a job (time limited, limited opportunities for promotion based on age or company, etc)
But I agree, not everyone is made to be an entrepreneur.
AAMGF tech behemoths make almost a million per employee, yet the median salary is 15% of that.
Going it along, you could probably build a better product in another niche market and take a bigger cut. It’s a risk/reward bet.
"Citation needed", also, it varies a lot between places.
And many would argue that places with skyrocketing property prices are going to run into significant issues in the future (if they aren't already at breaking point, hi bay area).
Owning a house also generally means low liquidity (should you want to sell), money going to repairs that you could otherwise just forward to the landlord and the requisite of putting up a deposit (money that can't be invested in say the stock market -- meaning you lose out on yield).
Rent went up from $1600-$2500 in a couple of years. My mortgage remains almost fixed except for property taxes.
So I think it’s a decent risk. My plan is to moonlight to a minimum delightful product. Once I have validation, and my feet touch the floor, I can quit my job and go
Entrepreneurship I agree is all about managing risk/reward.
Maybe in the next 10-15 years we can convince high schoolers that if they spent their free time programming they could be capable of creating a revenue generating asset at 18.
The combined power of a nation of kids that could create rails SaaS sites or reusable 3D models would be an awesome sight to behold. It's a skill they would keep and even pass on.
Tech is largely new, and we really haven't bothered to teach it yet.
There is actually a very good reason, namely that acquiring knowledge, skills, wisdom, etc. is at odds with acquiring assessment signals. The only way to become a good entrepreneur is to basically become unemployable.
I would disagree that the only way to become a good entrepreneur is to become unemployable. The best way is, as you say, to have knowledge and skill to create a useful product. Then, having a market that allows you to easily get paid for your work helps.
I mentioned high school specifically because I know that I would have loved something interesting to work on. It's a perfect time to work on skills rather than assessment signals. Lots of kids don't even bother with the assessment signals...
Sure. Once you've actually created a product that's useful, or at least impressive from a technical and/or design perspective, then you're easily employable at that point. But for most people there is still going to be a several year gap between when they start focusing on acquiring those skills and when they've actually built something impressive enough to function as its own signal.
Tech entrepreneurs do not necessarily have to start 'startups' in the HN sense of the word and I know there are plenty on HN who have taken the slower, bootstrapped path without rich friends, lack of debt, or even being based in ideal countries.
When you run out of mortgage money, your home is seized and sold, you will piss away tens of thousands of dollars of equity in foreclosure, realtor, and legal fees. Hundreds of thousands of dollars if you're in a down market, and you go underwater. You'll get to enjoy a ruined credit score... And, on top of that, all the other problems that you face when you can't pay rent.
I'd much rather be locked into a $1000/month rent for 30 years, then a $1000/month interest-mortgage for 30 years.
If you want an induction hob, a good mattress, proper ventilation system so the windows don’t have condensation and something other than paper thin walls, you are pretty much out of luck in the UK. On the other hand if you are fitting out your own place, upgrading to better quality items like this doesn’t really cost that much more (e.g. £200 for an induction hob vs £100 for a ceramic hob).
Suppose you bought a house for $300k, paid down $100k of it and sold for $600k. You’d be walking away with a decent amount of cash. In rental when you get kicked out, you get nothing.
Renting is paying someone else’s mortgage. If you know you’re gonna stay in one place for a long time, and the market is stable or booming, buying always makes sense.
You're comparing two different scenarios.
I myself started my first business at a time when I had virtually no money in the bank, and my car was literally repossessed one month before my business became profitable. If I had stopped and said "I can't afford this" and just given up and gone to get a job, I would have never seen the success that came later.
Also, you point out particular entrepreneurs who came from rich families. You completely leave out the wide array of entrepreneurs who did not. John Paul DeJoria, for example, was living on a friend's property because he was homeless and had almost no money. He started his business in those circumstances. He's estimated at somewhere in the ballpark of 3 billion net worth presently. There are quite a few stories of people with virtually no money building empires out of the rubble.
While I agree that there are a number of factors that feed into whether a startup is successful or not, I would kindly submit to you that one's attitude towards whether or not it can be accomplished is a very massive part of the picture. It takes focus and determination to get most businesses off the ground. Once you begin listing the reasons you can't accomplish it, you've begun setting up the circumstances such that you won't.
For me (formerly well-paid executive at IT companies in the US, originally from Italy), #2 (plus, some reserve money) was absolutely necessary to convince myself to leave my last job and start a company, last year.
Textbook example of self-selection bias and survivorship bias.
Even if you compiled a list, it would tell you nothing about the number of people who would have started companies had they not been mired in terrible financial circumstances.
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/do-you-need-a-wealthy-backg...
I have a mortgage, student debt, and do not know anyone particularly well off, I quit a very stable job, and am in the middle of launching a tech startup.
People get so hung up on privilege these days that they lose sight of the power of merit and strategy. I think it is a dangerous mindset.
You do not have to be free of debt. Your monthly debt payments have to be reasonable, something you can pay as part of routine monthly bills.
You absolutely do not need affluent friends or family. That's the least of all requirements anyone needs to start a tech company. First of all, it often doesn't take much capital to get started with tech companies these days. Second, your premise precludes someone having even a modest amount of savings (your theoretical person must be from a rich country, but they must have no money saved despite working a cushy job, odd combination).
You do not have to be a particular age. You're assuming everyone has children or a big mortgage. Birth rates in the developed world are at all-time lows, a lot of people are forgoing children or pushing it off until much later. You don't need a big mortgage, you can rent; most of the US does not look like NYC, SF, LA, Seattle in terms of cost of living.
You most certainly do not need to own a home. Multiple of your points put the theoretical person into that position.
> Looking at the most popular entrepreneurs in the world
Popularity is a pretty terrible reference point (why would that matter?). There's this group:
Larry Ellison grew up in a very broken home, his family didn't have much money. Paul Allen comes from an entirely ordinary middle-class background. Michael Dell's success required no special setup for what he did other than his own effort (assembling & selling custom PCs out of his bedroom, paid for out of his own savings), he grew up in an upper-middle class family. Elon Musk boot-strapped everything he did after moving to Canada, lived poorly and on a shoe-string budget after moving to the US. Jensen Huang of nVidia, was a first generation immigrant from Taiwan, with the deck stacked against him if anything; got his first degree from Oregon State University. Mark Cuban, who is more famous than Spiegel, grew up in an entirely middle-class background in Pittsburgh, and entirely boot-strapped his first success (MicroSolutions), which then paid for him to found Broadcast.com. Mark Andreessen grew up in farm country in both Iowa and a tiny town of 2,000 people in Wisconsin, his family had no special financial position. Ev Williams grew up on a farm in Nebraska, his family had no special financial position. Jack Dorsey grew up in a middle-class family in St. Louis, his family had no special financial position.
"Our primary finding is that successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young. The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0."
2,3,4 can be more generalized to be: "have access to sufficient capital to address the opportunity". Which in general I would guess that there are more 45-year olds with access to entrepreneurial capital in some form than there are younger entrepreneurs in the original stipulation of 2,3,4.
You can look even further ahead. Because the past few decades have been so strongly concentrating wealth upwards, one might predict that there will be fewer individuals with the personally owned capital to start businesses so the number and the 'risk level' of ventures to be shifting downward over time. The risk level would go down because the commitments of capital become more committee based the more people need to approve of it - and so you get fewer Elon Musk type investments, and more safe-looking investments in better paperclips (or the next social network ad app...).
1) Not clear what you call a rich country but Argentina has a lot of entrepreneurs and it is considered an underdeveloped country.
2) Best universities here are free and everyone in the world can study here. The average student study and work at the same time.
3) Lots of bootstrapped companies, limited access to capital.
4) Obviously age and family matter but you don't need to be the first founder who take all the risks. It is possible to join an existing company as a cofounder starting part time if you have critical skills to contribute.
Not saying that starting a company is easy, just saying that the world offers many different perspectives to the same problem.
[1] https://www.infobae.com/opinion/2018/04/18/siete-decadas-de-...
The number of famous and wildly successful startups outside of the US says otherwise :(
You are not understanding this thread. The discussion was about the difficulties people find starting a company that are mainly connected to economical issues. If you look at the successful companies, the major part had access to capital that eliminates this line of reasoning.
1) Healthcare costs (especially for a family)
2) Non-compete & IP assignment agreements (unless you are in CA)1) The world is moving towards remote work. You don't need to be in a rich country with talent. So long as there's good Wi-Fi.
2) If you have debt then you'll have to raise money and take a salary.
3) You don't need to do a friends and family round, or raise at all. We're bootstrapped, never raised a dollar.
4) I've met many entrepreneurs with young children or wanting to start families. Certain startups (eg. SaaS) can have very reliable income once you get your first several customers.
Also not born in a first-world country (though immigrated to one at a very young age).
Also nobody funded me until much later in my life, by which time I was already a millionaire.
"Why entrepeneurs become entrepreneurs" is a question that can be answered (to some degree). If more than one answer is possible, as here, it doesn't really make sense to complain that the question is a "tautology".
nontech led companies are dying, no growth to be had there
why would i work for that