The Illusions of Entrepreneurship | Hacker News Reader

The Illusions of Entrepreneurship

yalepress.yale.edu

24 pointsPaulHoule10 comments

Excellent book, however the Yale site is only referring to a specific version, this very good book is anything but out of print:

(Non-aff link): http://www.amazon.com/The-Illusions-of-Entrepreneurship-eboo...

I particularly like the sections why people start their businesses (usually because they can't/don't like to work well with people above them), and what age most people are when they start them (in their 40s) and succeed.

This Kindle book is... not available for customers from Canada??!!

Interesting. Yeah I just quit my job to try to start something. I wonder if the driving force that causes me to even think about businesses is because I can't/don't like to work well with people above me.

It's articles like this that make me wish desktop browsers supported phone-style multitouch zoom.

Tiny type, off-center, in a fixed column that takes up 1/4 of my browser window... ugh.

Try Readability (http://www.readability.com), though it actually failed on this article.

I spent an hour or so selectively reading this book. If you're doing a software startup, it's not that valuable reading. The essential premise is that there are a lot of "entrepreneurs" who start businesses like restaurants and repair garages and fail. They're self-selecting to a certain extent--these "entrepreneurs" are more likely to have smoked marijuana, more likely to have lost their job, tend not to deal well with having a boss, etc. The author even explicitly says something along the lines of "if a guy in his thirties quits his job at Microsoft to start a software startup, there is a substantial chance he will create significant wealth for society and therefore we should encourage this".

I guess you could read it if you're doing a software startup as a morale boost.

If you want to start a different kind of company and you haven't chosen an industry yet, this book could give you a good idea of what industry to pick. (Software isn't the only fertile one.)

Largely unimpressed with Scott Shane's take on things. He seems to bastardize the work of Paul Reynolds.

We need a tax policy that rewards a certain kind of entrepreneurs - what we have now is a disincentive.

Shane's conclusions regarding public policy run counter to most of what I have read. He says:

"We need to reduce the incentives for marginal entrepreneurs to start businesses by reducing the...tax benefits that encourage more and more people to start businesses. Because the average existing new firm is more productive than the average new firm, we would be better off economically if we eliminated policies that encourage people to start businesses instead of taking jobs working for others."

One of his premises from earlier in the book is that most startups in which barriers to entry are low are colossal wastes of time. This may be valid but it does not follow that GDP would improve if we made companies even harder to start.

Notes from the book: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17455578/hn/illusions-notes.html

That's not his premise.

He's saying 1 new worker added to a firm that already exists is more productive and causes more economic output than 1 new worker added to a random new business that wouldn't exist without the government benefits for them.

He's not saying they're a colossal waste of time, merely incentivising new hires in established firms will create more output than making new firms. He's just saying what the data is saying.

"Opening an Applebees is better than making a random restaurant with your own brand and corporate structure is more likely to create more economic activity".

Anyone got a cache? It's throwing an error that the record has been deleted.

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