Hacker News Reader

Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com