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Comment by bushbaba | Hacker News Reader

It’s easy to choose a career in entrepreneurship when you either have enough inheritance wealth to not need to work OR living in poverty where there’s not much lower you could drop. For those in the middle, entrepreneurship comes with likely too great a risk to be worthwhile.

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I'm not sure that's true given that immigrants are 80% more likely to start a business than people born in the U.S.[0]. That's the case in almost every country[1].

[0] https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/05/09/immigrants-are-80-more-...

[1] https://hbr.org/2021/08/research-why-immigrants-are-more-lik...

Wouldn't that fit the second criteria since many first generation immigrants don't have the requisite language skills to compete with the native population for middle class jobs.

A fair amount of immigrants are less likely to have resources like capital or relationships to accommodate a different path so parent is likely right that they are somewhat forced onto path of entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur twice over, it had everything to do with being able to spend the most productive hours of my day on being an entrepreneur and being armed with basic full stack web development skills.

I had zero success in entrepreneurship in my 20s and I was delusional to think I could accomplish anything in entrepreneurship without both of those properties (and I tried multiple times a year for the decade of my 20s). It would take someone truly amazing* to pull off starting a successful business while working a full-time job.

* And I say that in contrast to myself, who has been called talented more than a few times by my managers and still couldn't pull it off until I earned enough money to take time off

Wait so did you have full stack webdev skills or not? Or should we infer you learned it after your 20s.

I was in the process of learning it at the end of my 20s but hadn't quite gotten there until the cusp of 29/30. I did firmware, data science, physics research, and developed a scientific software framework before that.

Did you build up a financial cushion before you started for the second time?

Those who can afford to immigrant to western countries are not poor people at home country. If they failed in new country, they have option to go back to own country where they will have good quality of life as compare to new country.

We came to the US with a few suit cases and had to abandon all property in our home country. In general, many immigrants move to start over due to the relative lack of opportunity at home, whether due to politics, crime, economy, whatever.

I do agree with the original point. Nowadays, most STEM PhD students at top US schools are immigrants. When I look at the work, delayed gratification, etc, native Americans forgoing a STEM PhD seems a rather rational choice. Starting a company feels like a similar decision.. a lot of pain for statistically low gain.

Scared money don't make no money sir....

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