In the case of most people I've spoken to, the reason they don't start companies is they don't have the savings to work on it for 6-12 months, and gamble on getting accepted into YC or another angel/accelerator. They don't have a safety net to fall back on if that fails.
> they don’t want to take the risk
As many many articles have discussed, this is more about having personal financial security than any difference in personality or character.
A founder* is a hacker that never uses excuses.
Virtually any single person in the US can find a way to work for a year with low expenses, if they accept compromises. Appropriately enough for this thread, perhaps even by offering a very small percentage of equity to a friend to board.
Edit: How many founders have divorces, neglected children and ignored parents? How many founders avoid a relationship? Not a requirement to neglect family, since a successful founder is likely to be skilled at finding good compromises in business, and likely to use the same skill making reasonable compromises with their family life.
* think foresight combined with bricolage, jugaad, engineering compromise, ‘rubber band, bailing wire and bubblegum’ solutions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29164495
A founder* is a hacker that has at least a quarter million dollars of liquid money, or access to that from immediate family or close friends.
* based on the actual research around this
So, you don’t need a quarter million dollars to start a startup. I did it with $12000 that I had saved from my previous job, spent over a year, with a little consulting nightjob.
“What about if you have 3 kids, 2 dogs, 1 swimming pool and 7 secondary flats.”
Entrepreneurship is not owed to you. What we’re owed is renewing the elites if they are doing a bad job, using companies that start and replace the existing ones. Facebook, Whatsapp, Tesla and SpaceX didn’t exist 20 years ago, and 84% billionaires are first-generation billionaires, the rest are women and got rich by inheritance or marriages. So elites are ~96% renewed at my generation.
Job done.
I have helped found two businesses. The first I put in all I had (~10k), and the second was founded a year later because the first was failing and I was essentially broke. The 3 co-founders who all had small children drew down mortgages to fund themselves. Being hungry for money, we started doing some irrelevant consulting to pay ourselves some money: which was about minimum wage for the first year (not enough to pay all bills). I lived in a derelict building with opiate addicts (not my scene, but it was my friend’s addiction). As founders we were fortunate that we couldn’t get VC funding, since now we still own all of the business. The business hasn’t turned into a unicorn, but has been mildly successful, and now the founders have a better financial story than most first employees (@1%).
YC provides living expenses while you validate your idea and get funding.
There is usually a way to succeed but you must have the right thought patterns. If you are the sort of person who finds excuses, you are far better off being an employee. The amount of money a good engineer in the US can earn is astonishing.
On average, being a founder is a financially stupid decision. Most VC funds fail, and VC has seniority for any business sale, so founders have a much higher risk than VC. The chance of a 20% payout is nowhere near enough to cover the risks of failing. Be an employee, take your 1%, value it at $0, and enjoy banking your low risk salary and avoid screwing your health and have a social life and look after your family.
Please, try to avoid selection bias where you see a founder win $200M but you ignore the other majority of founders who failed and ended up with $0 and a broken life.
It's easy to make excuses for why you can't start a company and in fact there are a million great reasons why you should never do so. Starting a company is a terrible decision from a purely rational or financial perspective.
But don't act like it's not possible unless you're rich. That's just not true.
Then it was just "right place, right time."
First startup was acquired after Series A by a publicly traded company. Second startup was bootstrapped by the founding team of the first startup and was acquired by a publicly traded company. Third startup was acquired after the Series A by a competitor. Fourth startup was acquired after the Series B by a publicly traded company.
I had incredible co-founders and worked with some amazing teams. I only had one bad investor and was lucky enough to work with some incredible board members. But most of all, I had incredible timing and I embraced the grind.
Making nasty assumptions about any group of people is unhealthy - I hope you can learn to be more open minded.
I would like to see some figures for the average $ received by the founders of YC companies, for the first five years of YC. It wouldn’t surprise me if employees of those companies have a higher average $ return than founders.
Which is part of the reason for their compensation.
Did the first few factory workers and car design people at Ford become millionaires (in their equivalent dollars)? Probably not, but if you're the first engineer of a Twitter, Google, etc. it's not unreasonable to see your net worth to reach 7 figures, if not 8 figures. Early engineers are compensated just fine IMO, they are just taking a big gamble relative to the market (i.e. $500k annual salary at Google).
Sheer amount of money available and accessible to you once you are rich is tremendous. From stimulus funds from US Fed to parent's trust fund.
Right, those without capital are always compensated poorly relative to the value they produce. They don’t have a better option, which is part of the problem. One of the people with access to capital but possibly far less skill will end up being their boss and also receive the vast majority of rewards for their combined efforts.
> Did the first few factory workers and car design people at Ford become millionaires
True, but not necessarily optimal.
However many people also start companies without safety nets. Some of them fail and they might have drastic life moments, but in tech you always find some job, in fact your failed startup might be seen even positive by some employers...
> your failed startup might be seen even positive by some employers.
It's gotten much better since those days but having that startup is seen as an asset to the right company.