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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

> It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists of the richest people that occasionally get published in the press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own companies.

People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons we got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first place. Fuck this.

Edit: Sorry, to update after my rant. So many things wrong with this advice. For most people, starting a company is not the best path to happiness. Sure, if you have a job, there's a "boss" that tells you what to do as Graham notes, but if you think for a second you can do whatever the fuck you want when you start your own company, you're dead wrong. Of course, Graham knows this.

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He said "more exciting" at the beginning of your quote. And if the 14-year-olds somehow don't already want to be rich, how is Paul Graham telling them how to do it going to teach them that it is the most important thing?

If people often give advice about how to do a certain thing, pretty soon you are going to think that the thing is important.

Many people seem to survive 7 hours of advice on how to write properly, solve math problems, and understand history and science for 175 days a year over 12 of their most impressionable years without thinking any of those things are important. That doesn't give me a lot of cause for alarm over a 15 minute Paul Graham talk

It's still good to call out bullshit when you see it.

It's even worse than that. Not only is he saying that, he's parroting the bullshit idea that "starting your own company" is the relevant skillset, rather than "absolutely ruthlessly exploiting every moral and legal grey area to hoard as much value for yourself as possible with extreme urgency."

But I mean this is the guy that foisted Sam Altman onto the world, so clearly he already knows that. Which makes an article like this understandable as the propaganda that it is.

You don't write an article like this to influence kids, you write it to rationalize the giant pile of money you find yourself sitting on.

He's telling kids that they don't have to get a job, and one of the key objections is obviously going to be "but how will I get money". The emphasis in the essay is not getting rich, it's that it's a much more interesting path. And it is.

And then they hit the reality that thier startup is going to fail, even if they get funding in a non zero interest rate environment and they would have been better off just “grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) or even just working as a CRUD/Enterprise Corp dev and still be able to make the median household income in the US a couple of years out of school

They might have been better off financially - statistically, they probably would've been. But even my failed startups were more rewarding experiences by far than working in large companies.

And it doesn't preclude you from going and getting paid too much at a big tech co afterwards if it doesn't work. This field has been so lucrative recently that you can generally afford to not be earning at peak potential for a bit, so why not roam free for at least a bit, and let your interest take you where it will, rather than doing something you describe as a grind, just to earn the privilege to go sit in meetings for most of the day and count the years till you can afford retirement?

I bet you had parents or some other financial nest egg to fall back on to support your addiction to food and shelter.

Yes most people would rather not work to support those addictions I mentioned. But that’s what most people have to do.

Yes, I am blessed to have wonderful parents who would let me move back in. Fortunately, I only got to the "crashing on friends' couches and at my girlfriend/now wife's place" phase. Great way to tell if someone's worth marrying, by the way, partly moving in while appearing to have slim financial prospects.

Obviously it's not right for everyone, nothing is. But it's right for more people than the number who do it, and it's worth letting the others know it's an option. A similar talk by PG at my university is why I realized that this was a realistic option, and I'm incredibly grateful he gave it.

So the secret of being able to fail at a startup is being able to sponge off of other people who do have jobs at the types of companies you want to avoid working for?

Well, I didn't fail in that case, the company started making money, and they were repaid handsomely. But yeah, having a familial, social, or financial safety net is pretty important. If you never want to have to depend on anyone, or can't for whatever reason, then sure, play it safe. Sounds like you'd judge yourself harshly for taking this sort of risk.

You just admitted that in no case whether you succeeded or failed were you in any danger of being homeless and hungry because you were being supported by people who were willing to “grind it out” in corporate America.

You were never not “safe”

When Paul Graham is saying this is a talk he gives to 14 and 15 year olds, let's think of who those kids are exactly. There is zero chance he is giving this advice to a general audience at some arbitrary high school, much less students from even a modestly disadvantaged background. People at those places don't know or, even if they did know, wouldn't care who Paul Graham is. No, he's at the school his kids go to. The students are all in the same affluent circles as he is.

This is a pep talk for trust fund kids who can afford to mess around with start ups. It's probably lousy advice for most people outside the affluenza bubble.

> but if you think for a second you can do whatever the fuck you want when you start your own company

I know too many people born rich who think exactly this. And in their experience it works like that; they have no money stress anyway, take a little bit more risk and if it fails, well, they just fold and brag about ‘at least I tried’ and then try again or, you know, sit on the boat and get slobbered. Same thing. The rest of us don’t quite have this and especially bootstrapping your own company is hard, really hard; you will be doing a great deal of things that have nothing to do with what you want or set out to do and those probably turn out to be more important than what you started it for.

I think you're being overly harsh.

14 year old need good role models (preferably from their trusted social circles). These people should, ideally before the child turns 14, give him or her a strong moral framework to judge advice that they might come across.

On the topic of being rich (which can be a good goal if pursued along with a strong moral compass), it's much better to take advice from a Paul Graham rather from some grifter selling courses on "how to be a rich as me" on the net.

So in that case he might as well show lottery winners as good role models.

He could tell the truth instead about how most startups fail miserably and the founders see nothing.

Not to mention that the only way this works is if you have parents as a financial back stop.

Yes. I think this is genuinely under emphasised. However, when one's risk tolerance is high, there's a lot to be gained from even a failed startup. There's not much to be gained from repeatedly buying and losing at the lottery.

Knowing that worse case you get to go back home to live with mom and dad or ask them for money is not having a “high risk tolerance”

It is in a way. I couldn't jump into the startup world because I had financial commitments that necessitated an income. Several of my friends who didn't have that burden started companies.

> People like Paul Graham telling 14-year-olds that basically getting rich is the most important thing is one of the reasons we got into this late-stage capitalism nightmare in the first place.

I don't think that's a fair summary of the article. Yes, he says you can get rich. But he also says, and says first, that it's less annoying and more fun (and also more actual work).

Then for the rest of the article, he doesn't harp on "you can get rich". He talks about getting good at some technology, and doing projects because they're interesting, and finding other people to do things with.

Genuinely curious to understand your line of reasoning.

- Concretly what's the late-stage capitalism nightmare? How do you define it and what do you compare it against?

- What do you define what PG is concretely telling kids and how that's related to what you describe as capitalism nightmare.

Finally, would you care to share some examples of better scenarios that could inspire advice for 14-year olds?

Late-stage capitalism nightmare examples:

* Inequality in societies is as large as ever, and inequality is one of the main predcitors how happy a society is

* Influence of people and corporations with money on politics and society is unprecedented (i.e. lobbyism)

* In the US, but also in many Western European "developed" countries, basic human rights like education, health, housing and food are fucked by capitalism

PG is putting a big emphasis on getting rich and building your own company. Better advice for 14-year-olds would be, just off the top of my head:

* Money is important, but it's not the most important thing

* You are not your job or your company. Find something interesting to work for, but don't define yourself over it

* Participating democray is important: Fight for a more equal society and help make your community better

* Don't focus your education on one hard skill like computer science. Learn about arts, literature, philosophy and all other things that interest you

Exactly.

>In fact, this is the standard way to get really rich.

No. The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at Wall Street, law or Congress. Getting rich through business is a lottery.

I would have attributed this article from Graham to relative inexperience had he written this early on, say in the 2000s. But him writing this now is just bad-faith preaching intended to give VCs another lottery ticket with a very low success probability of forming a unicorn.

And for the record, 14 and 15 year olds, the best way to get rich is still Wall Street, Congress or law.

> The standard way of getting "rich" is to get into a good career that

> pays a lot. Before Silicon Valley, people got "rich" by working at

> Wall Street, law or Congress

I'm afraid this isn't really true. Through most of the industrial revolution and after (i.e. after the early 1800's), professionals (lawyers, bankers, accountants, doctors, etc.) made a smaller multiple of unskilled labor wages than they do today. In America at least, the way to get "rich" has always been to start your own business.

This was true in the 1800's and it's true today. There have been repeated waves of change as new technologies spread: textile mills, cotton production, mining, railroads, telecom, electricity, appliances, automobiles, department stores, advertising, aviation, broadcasting, computing, etc, etc. Each wave of innovation saw the creation of thousands of new businesses. Sure most eventually fail, but hundreds did pretty well and a handful got insanely wealthy.

American culture and laws (usually) rewards this sort of risky behavior. One can debate whether it's, moral, just, or good for society. But generally speaking, not much has changed wrt this facet of our culture over the last 200 years.

How many businesses succeed enough to make you millions? Most businesses are loss making entities, still more are just subsistence businesses. The ones which make you "rich" will still only make you worth a few millions, not what Paul Graham is referring to as "rich". You could get that same level of "rich" by working in Big Tech in a cushiony job, Wall Street, law or Congress (lobbyist or Congressman). Getting to what PG calls rich is just a lottery game in the big picture of things.

I've started one of the "small rich" businesses before, and made a few millions out of it when I was too young. Those millions enabled me to make certain bets that, though risky, would still have a huge upside. That huge upside allowed me to make very good money, the kind of "rich" that PG actually means, without the risk that comes with starting up a business that your VCs want to push to unicorn status. That's basically what most sensible rich folks in America have done, even the ones that you celebrate in your comment. And yet they'll all send their kids to Harvard and Stanford to attend MBAs and grad school because they don't want to put their kid's futures to the whims of a lottery.

"Making your first million is the hardest, so start with a second million." - Arnold Schwarzenegger

Most people are rich because they were born rich. Very few millionaires and billionaires were middle-class or poor and then started a company to get rich. And even those had an unfair advantage (e.g., born at the right time, at the right place, have the "right" genetic makeup, etc.).

There's another comment here that links to staticstics regarding this topic here somewhere

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