*younger people with family wealth. Some of my friends were unable to take risks because they needed to support their parents as well, and that puts a huge pressure to go with the safe money
This is definitively anecdotal, though I've been at / through approximately 5 startups across 12 years, and looking back, I believe each end everyone one (except for one) was definitely helped / started by a founder or set of founders who didn't have to worry about whether they went belly up or not due to family wealth. Hell, I still know some that I've consulted for that have lived in the bay area for the past 8 years without a product that makes any money, no vc funding, and were just out of their masters 8 years ago.
Clearly looking back, nearly every founder I've worked for came from a family with $$$. Even currently, at least one of my co-ceos just up and left their 2 million dollar menlo park house and went to live in their parents vacation home in monterey right when covid began.
Taking risks becomes extremely easy when you have a large family wealth backed safety net propping you up along the way. This happens way more often than people realize, and often the founder(s) will definitely not talk about this at all / downplay it if it is brought up.
The privilege is real.
I personally also don't think it is unfair if kids of rich parents inherit their money (or their support). After all, being able to take care of one's children is a major motivation of many people for trying to make money.
It's also well known that money is an important factor in mate choice for women.
Even without money, biology would be at work and people would be striving to find attractive mates to conceive "fit" children.
You could then also say those "fit" children are "privileged" compared to "less fit" children.
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Anyway, as your own anecdotes highlight, if you are not rich, find another way, for example a rich person who gives you money.
I believe, from experience seeing it, many founders who succeed will quote literally everything but their background, upbringing, and privilege as a factor, even though the fact that they had little to worry about while building their empire with respect to you know, the things everyone else has to care about on a daily basis (bills, debt, what happens if I fail) is an extremely large factor.
The barrier to entry of them taking a risk is so much lower that it is (in my opinion) directly correlated to their success at the end of the day.
Anyway, that's all. Less about fairness, and more about wish this was really highlighted more.
It's a shame, because I think it used to mean exactly the opposite, having a privilege was an honor. Is the phrase "it was a privilege to have known you" still being used?
I have intimate knowledge with writers, specifically offspring of well known writers who do their best to hide this fact, yet will still use their parents agent. And yes, it is unfair for them to believe they are on equal footing with any other writer.
That doesn't mean they don't try hard, but they do have benefits built into their life that others don't.
If you want to trailblaze without being perceived as someone of privilege getting there then you should take paths that align with that, and not ones that don't.
I used to think about this, "only people with relations can make it". When I got older I realized that if you care about some subject, you will probably end up making relevant connections on the way.
And I also think this way of thinking about privilege is self-defeating. If you don't have "privilege X", find another way.
Some writers now got rich without ever having an agent, self-publishing.
I'm sure people will find some other alleged privilege they had, which allowed them to do that. That's not the point.
If you are dead poor and have no connections whatsoever, you have the "privilege" to write authentically about being poor.
It's an ugly truth of life that I've come to accept: the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
Another tried and proven way is to marry somebody who is rich. Mostly just an option for women, though.
Marrying into money is an option for some, but you have to make a big emotional sacrifice (at least in Western culture) if you opt for going by wallet instead of going by heart. It's doable, but GP's point here is that a rich person doesn't have to make that choice.
If you Google, you should find a lot of articles about it, as it is an important sociological issue. Now that more women are having a career, in fact, more women than men are having an academic career, it is becoming difficult for women to find adequate men.
Also women marrying up was historically the MOST important mechanism of social mobility (people moving up in status/wealth). Too bad that feminism does not allow it anymore, as any man who marries a less wealthy women is considered to be "abusing his power".
The other claim, women being attracted to men with more money, I am less sure about. I am sure you can find studies analyzing data from dating platforms yielding that result, but I don't know how well they generalize to dating in general.
Edit: perhaps a starting point, but in general, Google should be able to help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy
"A ball player's got to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.
- Joe Dimaggio
I don’t expect the hungriest kids to have any chance in most pro sports unless they’re above average, at least in size for the major US sports.
[1] YC publishes stats on each class, but here's an umbrella stat that should cheer us all up: in the last 5 years alone, around 1,000 YC founders were female, Black or Latinx (https://www.reuters.com/article/venture-capital-y-combinator...)
If anything those coming from backgrounds I didn't list should try to be as involved as possible with startups. Thanks for the alternative take, but nothing stated was meant to deter as much as inform.
We also shouldn't erase potential truths for lack of crowdsourced data. We as a tech community have a large desire to ask for the source, which is great, but double edged.
Relaying information of this sort that I and others brought up is important on the basis of more eyes on the potential problem and looking into the data than not.