Too Much Entrepreneurship Is a Bad Thing | Hacker News Reader

Too Much Entrepreneurship Is a Bad Thing

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29 pointsmaigret27 comments

Here's my major beef with what's happening. The real metric of business success is whether you have a positive impact — on your industry, on your community, on (in a small way) the world at large. That doesn't always mean starting your own company. Most of the time, in fact, it means becoming part of a company that you love, with a purpose you believe in, and people who you can't imagine not working with.

Might be true at large, but my FAVORITE thing about communities of hackers is that hackers are principally CREATORS. The reason I left a 9-5 to spend more time with hackers in the startup community because this community self selects the flavor of person who sees problems with the status quo, wants to fix them, and has the power to exact change (usually through code).

In contrast, most of the general populace is in "cover your ass" mode, which is why the author is probably generally right when he says, "Most of the time [business success] means becoming part of a company that you love" -- but not right for most HN readers.

Well, I'd submit it's just as true for HN readers - with the caveat that the strategy here tends to be that if you can't find the company you love, you make one.

Changing the world doesn't have to be through starting a company. Often times, employees of companies, even established ones, end up changing the world. That's the entire point of the article, and one that squares well with the evidence. Consider Apple's recent products, the development of Java at Sun, the creation of Unix at Bell Labs, Gmail and Chrome at Google, and so on. None of the creators of these products (well, except maybe Paul Buchheit) made seven- or eight-figure exits, but they had much more of an impact on the world than the vast majority of startups, even those that did get acquired.

It's all well and good being entrepreneurial, but (in the US at least), health insurance has to be in the picture somewhere. Scavenging it from a parent or spouse, or just running barefoot, isn't a safe long-term strategy. Work it into the business plan, or work to change the business environment/law.

Assuming the average startup founder is under 30, this is effectively a non-issue. When I was 24, I got a high-deductible PPO that covered almost everything for $40/mo. That's beer money.

My point is moot if you're starting at 40, of course.

Or if you have a family...

Sure, but that clearly falls into the domain of personal choice. If you make the decision to raise a family, you presumably do this with awareness of the costs, consequences, and compromises that are likely to result.

You don't ask for cancer( although lifestyle choices do contribute ), but you do choose to say "I do", and either "Let's make a babby" or "Let's keep it", so this is not a material concern with regard to ethical consequences of availability of health insurance to startup founders.

Yes, due to the problems of health care here in the US, you're forced to choose one or the other.

Or if you have employees...

Why would you have employees before you can afford them?

> It's all well and good being entrepreneurial, but (in the US at least), health insurance has to be in the picture somewhere.

So does food and housing, but you don't see people scared of that.

I'm over 50 and overweight.

I paid much less for a very good single policy than I paid for rent.

> Work it into the business plan, or work to change the business environment/law.

Why should I pay for your health care while you start a biz?

For me, the beguiling aspects of entrepreneurship are financial independence and personal freedom.

I can't figure out the author's motivation for writing that piece. If you hire someone and teach them so much about your business that they could go out and start their own (hopefully non-competing), then aren't they more valuable to you? Won't their day-to-day decisions be informed by their knowledge about how they impact your bottom line?

As a founder of a company he sounds disingenuous when he says he admires people who want to become part of something larger than themselves. Appreciate, maybe. Admire? I don't think so.

Becoming part of a team is great as long as you're not sacrificing what's important to you. They are not mutually exclusive ideas.

From the article: "But I think it's incredibly wrongheaded to compete for talented people based on pitching a company as a training ground for someone's individual dreams, as opposed to a place where individuals can't imagine not being — because the product is so important, the values so robust, the culture so engaging"

Why is a person's goals antithetical to the health of a company? It's like he's trying to sell us on this antiquated notion that a company's worth is derived from its mission statement and culture.

I think it's more realistic to be aware employees have hopes and dreams beyond enriching the company.

I can't quite see how the title, the start and the end of this article tie together. Too many buzzwords and name dropping are definitely a bad thing.

I'm deciding that his article is a troll. He had a deadline so he strung together a bunch of ideas HN readers would hate. A classic contrarian article.

That also shows that most people don't actually read the article but love getting into debates based entirely on the headline!

This title is completely off for this article and it seems to ignore more general cases by focusing on silicon valley (which is fine, just misrepresented because this isn't even close to true everywhere else).

I've heard tons of stories from people who have taken jobs at startups to learn to run businesses themselves so I don't think that being up front about providing employees with what they're looking for anyway is a bad thing.

I agree with everything this blogger saids. It's funny because went attended a conference at UNC about facilitating entrepreneurial growth and I just remember thinking to myself that-"They are creating a new bubble".

Also, another thing to think about is that employers are also using the entrepreneurial framework or wordplay to inspire their employees to create new profitable departments. We are defiantly in the middle of a bubble either way.

Like all of you say the title throws you off. Its more a person who seems to be threatened by younger entrepreneurs or the ambitious youth of today.

However he is right in one thing, he is not right in saying that too many young entrepreneurs is a bad thing, he is right that we do not have enough experienced people in company culture, finance, HR etc. aspects companies need for after the 5 year struggle. (at least in the valley)

There is a difference between Entrepreneurship and playing the lottery. It seems like the author is upset about the lack of quality entrepreneurs instead of entrepreneurship in general. Lot of innovators creating real businesses is good while lots of people trying to strike it rich with the next big fad is probably not that beneficial.

As founder of a tiny startup, the biggest selling point for hiring was that you'd get to see a startup first hand and learn how to do your own.

Results: - One dev who's working on multiple ambitious projects - A startup that got into an incubator and still running - Another startup that's still running

Note: These last two were my interns, and I haven't had that many.

I've seen interns do great things too. One sold his webpage test app to Adobe, still works their in a senior position. One went to a small ecommerce company to engineer their database for scalablity - EBay didn't work out too bad for him either.

There's very little risk of Entrepreneurship overwhelming our economy. Sure it makes the headlines.

In a free market, there is no such thing as "too much" of a given class of workers. A free market corrects for a glut of N by making the expected failure rate of N too high, or the capital available for N too low, or both.

Bubbles can affect this dynamic temporarily, but eventually they always pop, usually leading to a temporary condition of too little investment in N. Believe me, it was not "cool" to be a dot com founder in 2001.

But in the long run, this cycle averages out such that free markets don't have long term misallocations of resources.

Whether the system we currently have can be described as a free market, though, is a question for another day.

I agree with you. It seems to me that having a startup currently is the new making a rock band. A few get super rich, many makes a simple living or side living from it, and many just fail miserably. It's life... They could all just do standard work in a office or be taxi driver, and contribute more "easily" (more predictably, but possibly with less gain) to the economy, but life wouldn't be so interesting then :)

Can't really argue that. But the problem is that the market correction is inherently painful. There will be an overshoot, and the correction will hurt everyone together. I think the point of this article is to try to avoid the worst of the overshoot, and thus the worst of the correction pain.

How? Its a free country, and people optimize their lives for their own perceived benefit.

Regulate startups? Businesses operated out of garages/spare offices/abandoned warehouses? Ridiculous -they are exactly the sort of thing that cannot be tracked, counted, taxed or bent to someone elses view.

I agree, up to the point where market imperfections come into play like externalities, "public liabilities" (i.e. opposite of public goods), etc.

The question is, is there an externality (negative) to entrepreneurship? Does it help relieve some public liabilities?

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