>Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
>Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
>Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
>Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
Youre saying that if you only consider the rich, then there's no difference between the rich and poor experience for making businesses
Um... the parent comment is in fact talking about that
The thing about not being able to make rent is that other things suffer — like being able to move to another city or, you know, eating.
I think it's much more likely that people who are too poor to participate cannot participate in gainful labour in a predictable fashion, i.e. their employment is sporadic, or shifts are unpredictable, or they are seasonal labour. i.e. they are not time-constrained, they are employment-constrained.
18% of households in the US say they can't afford home internet service: https://ntia.gov/blog/2022/switched-why-are-one-five-us-hous...
Seems like you're just trying to grandstand.
very hardly believable, unless they are chronically unemployed.
Corollary: Nearly every "overnight success" happens 'overnight', sure. But the 'overnight' period is after decades of slogging it out in the trenches of obscurity. The ability to freely take risks with life with high potential payoffs is partly attitude, and partly being able to get up on the high wire with a net underneath, so you can try again until you succeed. Many end up succeeding without really knowing why, or noticing that they had the net to keep trying until they did.
If entrepreneurs have no useful advice then there's no right or wrong way to structure or run a company, it's all random and any method will do. Just generalizing from other fields of study we know this isn't true anywhere else, so why would it be true for running a business?
Winning at horses is much lower variance, is easier to learn, and depends enormously less on accidents of upbringing and social class. VC has historically been a fallback for people who couldn’t hack it in proper finance, and while that’s a little unfair, it’s only a little unfair.
You might just be lucky, period, and still succeed. (Lightning does strike. ha, great name for a horse.)
But your chances are FAR better if you are well prepared, know the stats, know the jockeys, have inside info on what a horse has been fed, maybe even that morning, and so on. You might be able to rig things in your favor via inside connections.
But even with all your "skills" lined up, you still need luck and lots of it.
I think what I'm taking issue with is your statement that winning at the race track is _mere_ luck. No, like being a successful entrepeneur, it also requires lots of preparation.
Twitter by its nature is reductive. The position of the author here should really be read as: I know the other 5 lotto numbers. (baseline for a chance at success.) Now here is the 6th number, the random and lucky part that I'm taking credit for and that won't be reproducible by you.
Gambling is zero sum.
Businesses, even failed ones, generally do some positive things along the way.
Learning to do things that are useful and getting paid for them is really different from learning some useless information that happens to help you win at the expense of others.
Anyway, to be clear, this isn't the point I was arguing. Whether zero sum vs positive sum, where any benefit might lie (value to society, or to anyone at all) is not my point. It's that skill is clearly involved in both activities, as well as a large luck factor. Not only did I not like the race track analogy, I found the critical reading of the tweet to be too narrow to be useful.
For the record and again, I generally agree with your comment. But as a reply to my own, I think you went off base from my argument.