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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

You have to come from money to be able to make a succession of failed business ventures before you finally hit success

The only way to lose is to quit.

I am 36 and working on my 4th company over a period of 16 years. I've started even more projects that never materialized into companies. I worked for 4 years at a startup in-between failures. Besides working at the startup, I made minimum wage or less (12/16 years).

I'm 4 years into my current company, and things are just beginning to work.

Where do you get the money to fund repeated attempts? I'm confused at stories like this.

And what about the family? Children?

Would you say the same thing if we were talking about software startups?

Now: yes. 10 years go: no.

or believe it is all going to work out ok. You come in with nothing and you leave with nothing.

That’s not how banks work. They will want you to either buy in or put up collateral. You can’t just walk into a bank, say “here’s the detailed plan for my club, please give me a $100 000 unsecured loan.”

Note that you can buy in via personal debt, but that is not “leave with nothing”.

it depends on the scale. want to start a small cafe in a strip mall? if the mall has some unleased space, and is having problem filling it, you can cut a deal. my BIL did this, and negotiated a 5 year lease for a percent of his gross sales. the burger joint took off, and the landlord is very happy...he is paying twice the going rate due to success.

the landlord took the risk, could have been $0.

second hand restaurant equipment can be bought at a discount. food suppliers offer credit, 30 - 60 days.

if you are willing to put in the work, there are ways to get started other than borrowing money from a bank.

Nobody likes the pull your self up by your own boot straps advice, but it works. I know many people who started with nothing but being the best right hand person they could. They ended up with the business one way or another when the owner retired. I personally can think of 3 like that without trying.

The rule of incorporation in the US is to minimize the cost of failure to the individual.

> if the mall has some unleased space, and is having problem filling it, you can cut a deal.

> and negotiated a 5 year lease for a percent of his gross sales.

> the landlord took the risk, could have been $0.

Gross sales. That's sales before expenses. Your brother-in-law took on literally all the risk in this scenario. Unless the zombie apocalypse started in that very mall, any store was going to sell some burgers and your brother-in-law was going to be paying out to the landlord before he had covered his own costs.

sometimes that is what it takes. To say the landlord took on no risk is inaccurate. An empty unit can be better than a bad tenant.

Yep. You got it. No upfront investment, all the risk. But, he had ran a similar operation before. So he had an idea of what needed to be done, and how to do it.

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