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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

In a certain practical sense, aren't "the 99%", i.e. people without any significant cash cushion, precisely the ones who can't as easily take this non-VC, lifestyle-business route? If you need to pay rent and buy individual health insurance, it's a lot easier to do that if an angel or VC is fronting enough money to pay you at least a modest salary.

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I'd venture 90% of all new businesses have nothing to do with VC money.

In fact, my hunch would be that most are started with personal savings and family money.

I agree. The VC-funded startup is for the most part found only in the tech sector. You will never find a VC funded pizzaria, auto-repair shop, carpet-cleaning company, etc.

That's true, although most of those businesses' founders also don't have much of a choice: they aren't turning down a 6-figure pizza-delivery job or eschewing pizzeria-angel funding to open their own pizzeria. They just don't have much of a choice but to open it on their own and try to scrape by, sometimes borrowing from relatives, living with parents, getting "free" healthcare in the ER, etc.

I think it'd be a much less attractive choice if you were in an area like tech where you do have the option of a well-paying job or funding, though. Lifestyle businesses are still attractive in tech, but only if you're somewhat better off, either coming from a better-off family, having already had one minor success on a previous business, or spending some time in a lucrative job / consulting career that let you save up a cash reserve. That appears to have been Steve Blank's route as well; he became a self-funding entrepreneur only after first having a few successful exits from funded companies.

That's not true at all, there's a seed funded Indian burrito shop in Palo Alto in the whats-it-called shopping center called Tava or something.

Or a bank loan.

Not these days, unless you have a significant investment of your own to make. You're lucky if you can get an operating loc from the bank.

While I don't know what the correct number is I can almost assure you that it is nowhere near 90%. Quick and dirty if you were able to determine the amount of state business registrations and compare it to the amount of vc funded companies (even taking into account not every vc funded company is public) I'm sure you would find an extremely small number.

"personal savings and family money" - sba loan, mortgage the house, credit cards, equity line to name a few more.

I believe the article is referring to 99% of small business ventures being outside tech and not referring to the income disparity of the recent referred to in the occupy movements.

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