Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

<rant>

Why do millennials think that working on a side project for a short while constitutes a start up or being an entrepreneur? You had a vague idea, worked on it for a while and it turned out to go nowhere. There is nothing wrong with that. But it was just a side project and not a start up. It certainly does not make you an entrepreneur.

By that definition I have had a dozen start ups and almost every programmer I know must be an entrepreneur. When did the bar get so low? Is no action too small for self-aggrandizement?

If I write a blog post I am not suddenly a published author. If I give $20 to a homeless person I am not suddenly a philanthropist. Helping a friend with some code does not suddenly make me a professional teacher.

Millennials, get over yourself.

</Rant>

View on HN

I agree that this is not an exceptionally insightful blogpost.

With that in mind, wrapping this in <rant> tags is a lot like being the person who says "I apologize in advance if I act like an ass today but..." It doesn't matter how that person prefaces it, they're still an ass. Extending empathy and understanding to your need to rant requires of us the same level of effort as the inverse: you extending some understanding to a group of people steeped in a culture of entrepreneurship-as-the-everyday, and understanding why that might not mean "self-aggrandizement" but instead mean "the way people I know talk" in a very benign, even banal, way.

>almost every programmer I know must be an entrepreneur. When did the bar get so low?

Probably before you were born. See the old quote about Americans being a country where everyone walks around thinking of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". The word choice has changed, but the sentiment is nothing new.

Past that, you made me think critically for a while about the question "What if the people, who require temporary ego inflation to consider taking action, stop giving themselves that luxury?" and after some contemplation, I hope they don't stop. I hope they keep on keeping on. I also hope (as you do) that they will be a bit less insufferable in how they describe it afterward. But I don't want them to stop trying.

Besides, Side Projects are Never Successful anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch3oW550adA&t=3m39s

No real Scottsman!

What is a real entrepreneur then? Someone who quits their job and risks everything to fail?

You don't have to do that anymore for businesses with basically 0 startup capital requirements, > 90% margins and minimal time commitments ala software.

Are you calling for the classic starving artist entrepreneur who struggles through hell to build their business?

People don't always need to dance like that sort of monkey anymore, please stop demanding the weird masochistic performance porn. Working your self to a lonely death is no longer cool and shouldn't be again.

I'm sure you have other criteria that we must meet to be true entrepreneurs though. I'd love to hear them!

> businesses with basically 0 startup capital requirements [...] and minimal time commitments ala software

I don't know what world you live in, but in mine, new software takes a lot of time to write, or a lot of money to pay someone to write it.

I live in world where I can write the MVP to prove a business case in a week after / before work, sometimes with no code!

Edit: My MVPs may not meet your requirements for new software. They will not be all singing, all dancing. They will do some tiny slice of core functionality that allows me to prove the value of technologies application to the problem. Often with serious manual intevention.

An MVP is not a business.

I struggled to answer this without derogatory sarcasm.

I agree, an MVP is not a business. I would not expect that a business would be built in a few weeks or even months. My personal experience with businesses is that they take years.

But we're not talking about building a business. You do not launch an MVP and call it a business.

I was specifically talking about proving a business case for a solution that could turn into a business. This is precisely what the things we call 'MVPs' are mean't to be for.

> But we're not talking about building a business. You do not launch an MVP and call it a business.

Then what exactly were you talking about when you wrote this:

> businesses with basically 0 startup capital requirements, > 90% margins and minimal time commitments ala software.

> I was specifically talking about proving a business case for a solution that could turn into a business.

At that point, however, you do not have a business. And you're not an entrepreneur.

It's evident that you have no wish to change your mind and honestly, I have no wish to change mine.

An MVP is a Minimum Viable Product. What you describe lacks lacks both the "V" and "P" parts.

What is you're requirements for:

* Viable? * Product?

My requirements are:

Viable: Someone will use it. Product: Someone will pay me.

There's a lot of truth to what you're saying even if its a "get off my lawn Millennials!" rant (I'm guessing you're Gen-X?). I've known Gen-Xer's with this attitude and know many Millennials that call a side project a side project, so the generational slant to your rant is a little off.

What has this got to do with Millenials? Most of the young people I know nowadays are effective, professional, engaged, interesting. They, perhaps, share some foibles connected to the fact that they grew up with always-on internet, but they're not a heaving mass you can just foist your frustrations on.

Right? I don’t want to be a dick, but I don’t know what exactly the author was thinking. He seems upset that he didn’t get much developer productivity out of people he didn’t pay; well, what did you expect?

I don’t even know what he added to the project. He sounds like one of those ‘idea guys’ who think the hard part of a startup is thinking of features. No, the hard part is executing.

Reminds of that article posted here a week or two ago about the jet set entrepreneur types, outsource all your work to the cheapest possible option while you sit on a beach drinking mojitos or more likely whine in a blog post about how your start up failed.

You're being harsh, or we did not read the same piece.

While, towards the end, the OP briefly refers to his efforts as "a startup" I think he was pretty clear that he was mostly trying to get to a point where he could __start__ a startup.

This has nothing to do with millennials. I am 44 and there were and are plenty of people in my demographic cohort sharing these characteristics.

From a brief glance, the protagonist here is white, male, a philosopher and a Michael. To attribute something you don't like about his statement to his age (as opposed to his race, gender, philosopheritude or Michaelness) is a statement about yourself (and possibly your idée fixe). It has little to do with the piece or person you're commenting on.

What the heck do you mean by "Michaelness"? Michael O'Church-esness, the snowflake who used to rant here about how The World fails to reward his outstanding talent?

It's a randomly chosen characteristic that may or may not have any causal relationship to what the commenter didn't like about him. Just like age.

>>> working on a side project for a short while

imho, it has nothing to do with the time you work on it. Some people are blessed with "the good idea" and get the opportunity to hack they way from a side project to real entrepreneurship.

Why entrepreneur is such a valuable term for you?

meh. my side project turned into a venture-backed startup. Am I allowed to call myself an entrepreneur now?

You are only an entrepreneur when you take and gamble with the money of an investor.

Shrug It's a fad. Like using MongoDB or the gold rush. Just position yourself for consulting/selling pick axes and jeans.

Hello! As the person who wrote the post (but didn't put it here and only just found out someone else did) I found the fact you were annoyed at me for claiming to be an entrepreneur confusing. I found it confusing because as at no point did I claim that.

The title of the post is "... the app that never quite was" and the first line of a post states "I spent I spent two and half years trying to start a startup". The story is how I spent loads of time, failed to succeed in any interesting way, feel kind of embarrassed about it, and want this to be a lesson to other "asipirant effective entrepreneurs". Note the use of 'never quite was', 'trying', and 'aspirant'. I'm not sure I could have told my story of non-failure (failing even to fail) in a less aggrandising way.

I welcome your suggestions on this last point, if you have any.

The headline I see on your page is "Ineffective entrepreneurship". While I disagree with most of what grandparent said, it does seem like a fair response to that headline to say: you weren't an ineffective entrepreneur, you were a non-entrepreneur, and maybe you would have been more effective had you been more entrepreneurial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com