It shouldn't be made easier for startups - it should be made harder | Hacker News Reader

It shouldn't be made easier for startups - it should be made harder

I've recently been having a discussion with a successful serial entrepreneur who says that government (and other) initiatives to make it easier for startups are misguided. He says it should be made harder, because that way those who are destined to fail will do so earlier, whereas those who are likely to succeed will have less competition for what help does exist.

This seems to me similar to the idea that computer languages for education should not be made easier, because if someone can't cope with the complexity then they're better kept out of programming anyway.

I'm not (yet) going to state my position. I'd first like to hear what other hackers say.

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It's in the country's best interest to have a thriving economy; making it easy to start a business supports this concept. The whole idea of throwing up obstacles to weed people out smacks to me of elitism. Starting a business is difficult enough without adding more rules, fees, licenses, etc that have nothing to do with the business's day to day operations.

Just look at countries where you need to have $thousands in escrow/bank before you can even get off the ground and compare how many small businesses they have to the US.

I mean, really, if I wanted to start a business tomorrow I could do so without filing a single piece of paper as long as I did it under my own name. As long as I'm not in a regulated field, all the gov't cares is that I pay my taxes. It doesn't get any easier than that!

I want my government to make things harder for startups that cause honest threats to safety or security, but in all other cases I want it to mind it's own business and let everyone else mind theirs.

It really depends on what easier means. It should certainly be made easier to negotiate the inevitable government red tape, the form-filling and box-ticking that is usually actually completely unnecessary to anyone but the bureaucrats. That's just friction in the economy. I'm not actually sure what grants can be made for startups, but the government almost certainly should not be involved at all, since its agenda is almost never "create wealth" (as a long-term tax strategy) but "create jobs" (as a short-term election strategy).

I'm not sure whether the limited gov support for entrepreneurs / making computer languages for education harder analogy quite works. Namely, the latter is a taught course, therefore it needs outside quality control, whereas enterprise is more of a journey - thus posing the question of can entrepreneurialism be regulated at all. I agree with the serial entrepreneur, but for a different reason - I don't believe governments should be involved in the enterprise space in general. Governments should concentrate on keeping the general infrastructure working -transport, energy, education - and then entrepreneurs will make things happen. In the UK, our prime minister Gordan Brown is heavily involved in promoting enterprise, but I wish he would focus less on having his picture taken with successful entrepreneurs and concentrate on tackling our public transport problems which can make me late for meetings with potential clients unless I budget in 2-hours safety time.

a bad idea is still a bad idea, and a good idea is still a good idea. if you end up competing for government help, the ideas that will likely survive will likely win out anyway.

I'm confused - why is this submission not appearing in the "Hacker News" section? It's in the "News" section ...

Now I'm more confused. Why did that get down-modded rather than answered? I've checked the FAQ to try to see why "Hacker News" doesn't seem to contain this submission, I've asked a sensible question, and it gets down-modded.

What have I done wrong?

It's in the "new" section, not the front page. New submissions don't usually end up on the front page @ http://news.ycombinator.com/ until they've had a chance to be modded for quality and relevance.

I guess I'm just confused because the last two times I submitted something it seemed to go in the "New" section (as did this one, and that's obvious) but also almost immediately into the "Hacker News" section. From what you're saying, those previous two submissions may have been the exeption, rather than the rule. Perhaps I was simply misled.

I wonder if the FAQ should be updated to add a comment such as:

"Not all 'New' submissions make it to 'Hacker News'"

"It can take some time for new submissions to make it to the 'Hacker News' list, if at all."

Anyway, thanks for replying.

The business cycle offers a pretty good compromise: alternating periods of easy and hard.

The easy phase expands the search space, the hard phase prunes the less promising branches.

My position is the government should make things neither easier nor harder for startups. Let natural selection do its thing. Startups that have marketable memes will raise the capital they need. Startups without such memes will not. The extremes of dishing out tax payer money on grants to questionable startups often just wastes money the government could otherwise use for things like paying down the deficit. The extremes of "squelching" business works in a negative direction as well, because it hurts the GNP. I think the government should neither give hand-outs to startups, nor should they work against business, such as in the anti-trust suit against Microsoft. The government should live and let live when it comes to startups and software companies in general, and let natural selection do its thing.

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