Start-ups tend to flourish following a downturn | Hacker News Reader

Start-ups tend to flourish following a downturn

economist.com

13 pointsmatstc8 comments

The title is taken from this quote in the article and feels like a legitimate summary of the tone of the article, which is upbeat.

"Carl Schramm, the head of the Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes entrepreneurial activity, points out that start-ups tend to flourish in the year that follows a sharp downturn."

I think flourish in this context means "many are started" not "many are doing well three to five years later." I am a committed entrepreneur but I think too many blog posts and articles are encouraging folks who are not fundamentally entrepreneurs to try something that will likely fail and leave them worse off, not better. The penalty for this in your forties and fifties is much higher than in your twenties. Many of these laid off folks might be much better served to wait out this worldwide recession over the next year to 18 months by frugal living and part time work, not by spending any funds trying to start a business.

I blogged about this in "We Don't Encourage Individuals to Form a Start-up" http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/12/04/we-dont-encourage-in...

The title is taken from this quote in the article and feels like a legitimate summary of the tone of the article, which is upbeat.

There are 8 paragraphs in the article. The concept of startups or starting a company is not introduced until the fifth paragraph. Since the focus of the article is not startups, the title of this HN post is a poor summary to me - it feels worded just to get modded up.

Sorry if this is misleading. I read the article on paper and that was the pull-quote. I decided to use it because the real title 'The upside of a downturn' was not descriptive enough to me.

If you look at the last two dozen articles matstc has submitted over the last nine months (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=matstc ) none of them substantially modify the original title, and in fact this title is taken from a subtitle in the article. If it was "worded just to get modded up" it would be unusual behaviour on matstc's part. The subtitle starts the section of the article that HN readers would be interested in.

The title of this item is not the title of the actual article - and the title here doesn't summarize the article very well at all :( Only the last few paragraphs talk about startups.

It'll be interesting to see if this time is different. The drop in securities right now is significantly sharper than in 2002, so these "older workers" are less likely to take flagrant risks this time around.

Ha, I've clicked this 3 times because firefox clears my history and I saw the title and thought "hmm, I don't remember reading that." This sort of title changing for editorializing is the main reason I can't read Reddit.

Yeah, misleading title, but still a good article. I especially liked the heading "Hire Yourself" before the startup portion of it.

I'm not trying to discourage startup founders, but in the face of much contradictory evidence and the general audience here, this seems like a case of confirmation bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

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