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Comment by Merad | Hacker News Reader

> [...] doing your own startup is one of the few relatively low risk gambles one can take.

I was under the impression that around 90% of startups failed. Was I mistaken, have the numbers changed, or do we just have very different thresholds for "low risk"?

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I have started a number of businesses, even what I considered the unsuccessful ones still made me more money than I would have made at any 9-5 I could have had at the time. You just have to be willing to do something boring and compete against businesses that aren’t currently being run well. Starting the 7,000th craft beer company is gonna be really hard but (for example) being the #1 powerwashing company in your town is boring but way more lucrative

You can start a business that you get an dopamine hit from telling people about, or you can start a business that makes real money. Pick one.

Or you can create a cryto scam and have the best of both worlds.

What makes you think being the #1 powerwashing company is going to be any easier than making an equivalent amount of money in the corporate world? Do you have any reason to believe you are better at powerwashing than the other 99 guys in your town?

The point is to pick a boring business where it’s easy to become #1 in a market based on current competition, clientele, skills, etc.

In the corporate world you are still trading your time for money. When you own a business you decide what and how much you want to do, up to and including nothing at all while still making an income. Boring businesses make it easy to hire people to do the stuff you don’t want to.

There’s no such thing as a business that’s both lucrative and trivial. To the extent that you need finesse, hard work and luck to build a successful business, the same combination of finesse, hard work and luck could land you an equally or more lucrative corporate job.

You can also make passive income by investing your large corporate salary and earn extra income without working. There’s no such thing truly passive, zero labor income when running a business, there’s always some managerial overhead even if you delegate as much as possible. Index funds are truly 100% passive.

Not true. You hire a CEO if you really don’t want to do anything. And it is a lot of work but usually nothing that difficult for straightforward businesses.

The average enterprise dev in any major city in the US can make twice the median household income with 3-5 years experience.

That’s still not that much

It’s not that much yet people making the median household income are not living on the street going hungry.

That's a pretty low bar, though. There are many different levels of struggling but I don't think it is productive to deny challenges of someone just because they are better off than some others.

Do you mean “struggling” as in “I can’t provide myself with food and shelter” or do you mean “I can’t put little Johny in private school and buy the 3500 square foot house in the burbs and go on nice vacations twice a year”?

High failure rate ≠ high risk. Everything with a high upside will have a high failure rate, but working 10 hours on your own startup a week is definitely lower risk than gambling with options (which is what /r/wallstreetbets is doing) or gambling with crypto (even higher risk).

I know people that made low 7 figures last year flipping NFTs, but the risk profile (to me, at least) was untenable. At least in Vegas you get free drinks.

Ok, but the comparison was to a 9-to-5 job, not gambling.

That's even more of a no-brainer, as an average 9-5 has practically zero upside, so your net worth is likely to stay flat (if not even go down). We like to pretend that the /r/wallstreetbets or crypto people are crazy, but most are median earners that feel that there's no way to break out without gambling. When we look at the housing situation, most are sadly right.

What do people want? To marry a cute girl, buy a house, have a few kids, retire, go fishing; if they get that big promotion maybe even buy a boat. But this life is simply not attainable today.

> That's even more of a no-brainer, as an average 9-5 has practically zero upside, so your net worth is likely to stay flat (if not even go down).

The average millionaire is just a schmuck with a high paying 9-5 job. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, generic corporate drones etc. I don't know where you got the idea that it's impossible to make more than a subsistence wage with a W2 job but you are wrong.

I mean, you already probably know this, but the risk profile of a startup that fails is not that you keep your money constant. It’s that you’ve been spending it all on rent and utilities for the last 7 years and have nothing to show for it. You’re still gambling away your savings, at a much slower and controlled rate, and the house at least doesn’t have the advantage over you, but it’s still incomparable to the risk profile of a 9-to-5.

Yep, a 9-5 has no risk, but no upside. In my humble opinion, a startup provides the best "balance" between risk and upside for those of us that come from lower or lower-middle class. I think your 7-year example is a bit contrived, since (barring exceptions like biotech, space, etc.) if you're working on a project for more than 6 months without product-market fit and/or growth, you're doing something wrong.

I think think that is borderline dangerous advice. Most people don't have the mindset or proper understanding of the startup world. On avg if you enter the startup space you are going to get chewed up and spit out and find yourself looking in the mirror at a middle age face with nothing to show for a lifetime of work.

I personally find trading crypto to be lower risk than options trading. They have options-like returns, but without the theta decay - you have a longer time period to be on the correct side of the market.

If done right, such a failure only impacts the investors, and anyone who took stock instead of a proper wage. The savvy founder pays themselves a salary high enough that they are totally in the black long before the bank arrives to repo the furniture.

The cool part is, you get to try again.

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