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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

This is easy to say when you have capital or access to capital. Having lived most of my life quite poor, I find it somewhat frustrating to hear things like this. When you can't afford food, rent, health insurance, etc, the last thing you're thinking about is dumping your life savings into a new business that has a 90% chance of failure.

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Heh...yeah right there with ya bud. I've learned to just kinda internalize it. But on a bad day that can be difficult. Like when you hear someone saying how you just need to take a chance and mention something like dipping into savings or the possibility of living off your spouses income for awhile and it's simply not possible. And the sting of some of the responses you get...they're not wrong. They're 100% right. But still, it sorta feels like you've walked into a nice restaurant off the street and are shocked at the prices. And you notice others giving you a disappointing look and hear someone mumbling "Why are they even here if they can't afford it."

For some of us just getting to the point where you're able to take a chance is a goal. And if we're lucky enough to achieve that, it's not the lack of backbone that keeps them from taking that chance. It's that the equation for them is different. Failing for these people isn't falling on their face but falling on their face from 3 floors up. There's much more to lose and we're intimately familiar with what it's like at the bottom. It's more than living comfortably but the sense of pride in being able to support yourself and loved ones that you simply can not risk. Not being able to do those things truly makes you feel worthless and if you achieve that and have half a brain you wouldn't want to risk it in a million years.

The post was written for people who are interested in starting a company. If you're not in the financial state to be able to do so, then blogs about starting companies are probably not for you.

HN has a disproportionate amount of people trying to snipe "survivorship bias!" whenever someone does start a company, is successful, and wants to share what worked for them (much like what pg is doing in this post).

Why are these people here, I will never know.

It is possible for someone to simultaneously be interested in starting up a company and also recognize / call out logical fallacies.

"Eat yogurt for breakfast and you will be a successful lawyer" is survivorship bias, which I think is fine to call out an ignore.

"Reach out to all of your rich friends and family" is privilege, which I think is also fine to call out but shouldn't completely be ignored. Your individual "privilege" might be from participating in a veteran's group or knowing someone with special needs. Something that puts you in a unique position to address a problem better than others have. Having money is one of the most generic forms of privilege, so offering insight to when and how to best use it is useful.

I’ll have a choice soon to invest part of my savings into very cheap stocks or to fund my startup with life savings. I don’t think, I’ll do latter. On the other hand keeping startup costs low is universally good advice.

If you can afford to do it, it is indeed a great time to start a company.

Yeah, I see this myself right now. My small, little irrelevant startup wouldn't exist if I didn't have the money to try it for a year or so. Obviously, it helps that I never stand the risk of loosing health care coverage, unemployment benefits and social security in doing so. Which is one incredibly important aspect, it reduces the risk considerably.

The Airbnb founders both maxed out their credit cards, and famously kept the lights on by selling cereal at the 2008 Republican and Democratic conventions. I believe the actual idea for Airbnb spun out of them realizing it could help them pay their rent.

> and famously kept the lights on by selling cereal at the 2008 Republican and Democratic conventions.

Sounds like a great exaggerated story.

> I believe the actual idea for Airbnb spun out of them realizing it could help them pay their rent.

That may be, but the founders come from well to do families and I'm sure never worried about missing rent, getting evicted and being homeless.

There might be rags to riches stories out there. AirBnB ain't it. It's a riches to extreme riches story.

Almost certainly a lie. What would techcrunch write about, if the founders said something banal?

Revisionist, sexy origin stories are a proven way of getting free press. Somewhere, these guys are actually confessing how much free press their wild concoction earned them

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