All my attempts at entrepreneurship have been via moonlighting, and have failed. There just aren't enough hours in the day. But I can't just quit my day job and take my income down to $0 to pursue a startup.
After a success under your belt, it's easy to keep going and get more funding. There's no shortage of capital looking for people to fund right now (it goes through spells).
The first time I got funded, it was through a rich elite idiot's social connections (CEO). CEO was a sleazeball, and got all the financial and most of the branding benefit of the venture, despite doing no work. I launched a successful business with CEO as the figurehead, and in the process, I got:
1) Connections and network
2) Visibility and branding
3) Stepping through the process once. Moonlighting can be enough time if you're efficient (which you can't be if you're muddling through figuring stuff out)
It was a stepping stone towards financial stability, and I'm much closer. Socioeconomic mobility is a process. Some people get lucky, of course, but for the most part, there's a pathway from:
1) Unskilled labor; to
2) Professional labor loaded with student loan/mortgage debt; to
3) Financial stability; to
4) Being able to launch high-risk high-reward ventures
That's possible, but it generally takes a few generations:
* It's possible for someone without an education to send kids off to college through public schools, but they'll have a hard time competing with kids who were exposed to advanced tutoring, math, STEM, makerspaces, etc. from an early age (children of professionals)
* It's possible for first-generation professionals to network into power networks and achieve financial stability, but they won't be in a place to quit a job and launch a new venture.
* And it's possible for children of professionals to then (finally) engage in a few high-risk high-reward projects until one pays off....
2) Professional labor loaded with student loan/mortgage debt; to
3) Financial stability; to
4) Being able to launch high-risk high-reward ventures
That's possible, but it generally takes a few generations"
That sequence is coming up a lot lately in discussions of African Americans low wealth accumulation across generations, relative to whites.
In the sense that, first through slavery, then through Jim Crow, then through red-lining, and other forms of egregious discrimination, that multi-generational sequence of wealth accumulation has been artificially interrupted.
It's not clear what should be done to rectify that imbalance. (Reparations? Or is it enough to allow this sequence to play out unobstructed starting with current generation of African Americans, similarly to if they were a new immigrant family.)
My family has moved up these rungs, and someone seems to have unscrewed the rungs. They just don't seem to be there anymore. Public schools no longer have:
* Gifted and talented programs
* Or any other support for kids getting ahead of standards (even quality books in the library)
This is all done in the name of social justice. The only families who can get ahead are ones who are already educated enough to teach their kids at home, or rich enough to hire tutors and pay for afterschool programs.
I'm not opposed to reparations per se, if someone were to make a coherent proposal (I haven't seen one, and with each generation, it gets harder to make one, as there aren't clean lines between former slaves, slaveowners, people who benefited from slavery, etc.), but I'm not actually sure they would help. If my grandparents on my dad's side were slaves, and on my mom's side, owned slaves, am I paying reparations? Am I getting paid? How's this even supposed to work?
And how would we manage this so it wouldn't be like winning a lotto, where the money just fades into nothing?
But on the whole, I'm more a fan of fixing obvious problems, such as how public school funding ranges at least 4-5x between rich and poor districts, issues with criminal justice, and so on.
I'm also a fan of targeted subsidies. I wouldn't mind if my taxpayer dollars paid for subsidies for lower-income kids to have the same sort of access to at-home and out-of-schools supports as my child does (STEM resources, programs like RSM/AoPS, etc.). Or if we had entrepreneurship subsidies in lower-income communities. Or more equitable tax structures. And so on.
However, the engineer in me would hate to not be building the thing myself.
But yeah, it's a fair point. For some people, it's not living hand-to-mouth. For others, it's being able to have a mortgage rather than rent. [insert-my-definition]. For others, it's being able to live without working indefinitely. For others, it's being able to launch businesses from a personal bank account. I was vague.
In my area: The rent / mortgage eats the lion's share of your runway. If you're paying rent / mortgage, your savings don't go very far. If you've paid off your home, it's easy to stash enough away to live like a graduate student for a few years. If you own your home, you can also always scrunch together, and rent out a room.
The generational flip side is:
- Your kids inherit your house and your savings some day. That should be enough to cover much debt, or if you have many kids, at least down payments.
- Your kids can move in with you anytime, if they're laid off, launching a startup, going through a tough time, or just want to save some money. It's a safety net.
But I get it, I'm like you. Also had a college loan to pay off, later kids.... So I stuck to the day-job, read about the high-flyers and work instead on trying to get-rich-slowly.
And not so famously the 90%+ of entrepeneurs who failed and lost everything.
Survivorship Bias is sooo rampant in SV.