Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobjordan | Hacker News Reader

I graduated with an MBA in 2008 from a top 10-ish school, just before the Great Recession. I had no desire to be an entrepreneur. I pursued the consulting track and landed a full-time offer from my summer internship, but I got laid off in 2009 along with about half of the firm. After that, I did contract consulting jobs for a year and ended up working on a project in China. As that project ended, I still couldn't find a suitable permanent MBA-level job, so I started my own consulting firm in China, which later became a contract manufacturing company. About 14 years later, I am still running my own company. There have been plenty of years I haven't been able to pay myself a salary of $180 grand a year like these top MBAs expect to start now. But, I also had a few good years where my company put over $1M in the bank. Now, it's nice to mostly work on whatever I want to think about every day. Economic cycles happen, just must make your own future.

View on HN

This seems like it boils down to "if you can't find someone willing to hire you, start a company and find someone willing to hire it"? Which solves the problem of not having a job, I suppose, but doesn't necessarily solve the problem of not having an income.

Contract manufacturing sounds like a very specific field. Were you working in contract manufacturing before, or did you basically make a career pivot into manufacturing because that's where the opportunities were? (If so, very savvy!)

I think it also comes off as anecdotal with no good causal relationship. I have no doubt the parent put in a lot of hard work, sacrificed much, and struggled. But I'm not convinced the strategy is repeatable. A saying I like is "the harder I work, the luckier I get." Because hard work gives you the ability to take advantage of opportunities. But at the end of the day there is a combination of hard work and luck. Maybe this is just how the world is, but we're humans so we have the power to shape it, and I think we should make hard work less reliant upon luck. But I think one of the first steps to doing that is recognizing how stochastic the system (both what we can control and what we can't) is. I'm glad this worked out for the parent and I sincerely do not want this comment to undermine their work. But I think we're often too quick to assume a repeatable process and not selection bias.

I think not so much "the harder I work, the luckier I get" as keep working even if you don't get paid much for a while. Which probably is repeatable and you'll likely make money eventually if you bring value to others.

While I do believe in "the harder I work, the luckier I get" mentality, what you said there about "keep working even if you don't get paid much for a while" is the critical factor. I had to stop comparing what I could pay myself versus my peers and even my own post-MBA salary, as I made significantly less for a few years.

My background pre-MBA was in manufacturing, not necessarily contract manufacturing, but factory operations heavy positions. If I did anything that was "savvy" was just recognizing that it was a relatively great time to start a business located inside China. I was able to manage my working capital very well in the early days by receiving credit from facilities in China, and it was easier than it would have been in America. Then, we got into GoPro camera accessories like when it was GoPro v1-2 days. That took off and allowed us to grow into a contract manufacturing company.

In about 2004 Business Week had an article that said 'the value of an MBA is simply the salary of the job that your school gets for you on graduation'. No job, no value. Some schools have much better placement departments than others.

One of the best parts of running your own company one-person or small consulting company is to decide when and how you pay taxes. So, for example, you can work for a while, build up capital in the company and then not work for a while still paying yourself a salary.

Basically using the company as your savings account. If you don't mind paying yourself a lower salary you can take advantage of progressive tax as well.

It is about minimizing how much you work, it doesn't really help you to maximize how much you earn if you want to work full time with no pauses. It essentially levels out your tax burden across multiple years.

People like you are what cause an uptick in the economy. Thanks a lot for sharing.

Inherited wealth works wonders.

Is repeating this some sort of mental self defense mechanism that gets activated whenever you see someone successful that makes you wonder if you made the right choices?

Theyre probably statistically correct though.

Everyone loves a small business success story because they think they could do that but like 95% of small businesses fail in the first 5 years.

And normal wagies probably aren't able to take these kinds of high risk activities.

So that person is either extremely talented or extremely lucky or has inherited wealth.

Statistics is on the side of inherited wealth.

> Statistics is on the side of inherited wealth.

Until you look at them. The vast majority of small businesses aren’t created by wealth and the majority of millionaires are self made.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com