Give Me 30 Minutes, and I Will Kill Your Entrepreneurial Dream | Hacker News Reader

Give Me 30 Minutes, and I Will Kill Your Entrepreneurial Dream

johnroa.substack.com

16 pointsjrnyc10 comments

I would cut everything above the “Why I Love Destroying Dreams” section.

I used to work with SCORE, an entrepreneur mentorship program with local chapters. This kind of dissuading tough love was part of the advice that would be given. However, it’d be presented more as homework for the entrepreneur: validate your market, have answers to sales objections, plan to shore up capitalization, have deeper conversations with family that will be supporting you.

Some entrepreneurs did probably need a tougher lecture that suggested nothing would help if they didn’t apply enough raw tenacity and diligence, but many succeeded after smaller changes to their thinking. The 99% failure rate is not accurate when the entrepreneur has a reasonable idea and plan.

"Here’s a particularly bleak statistic: a 2021 report showed that almost half of all entrepreneurs earn less than $30,000 a year. That’s less than the average kindergarten teacher—except kindergarten teachers don’t have to explain to their spouses why they spent $10,000 on a logo redesign."

I would love for the author to cite their sources on this but I do find it vibes with my experience.

In the tech world, it's not uncommon for founders to attract enough investment to at least pay themselves something before they have any revenue. But in lot of lines of business you can work very hard shouldering massive responsibilities, and take home almost nothing.

This essay feels very AI-generated. Was unsurprised to reach the end and discover that the "author" is the CEO of an AI business.

The lack of cited sources makes me think so too.

Strange considering the linked "original" Medium post does link to other sources, and also seems to be written by a human. It's like he fed that article to an AI and asked it to generate a version tuned for virality?

Author here, and no. Just updated my Medium post to be a bit more verbose. I did fail to re-cite, so thanks for calling that out!

> we’ve started to mistake wealth for wisdom. Want proof? WeWork’s Adam Neumann once tried

Hate to be that guy, but that's not a proof, that's an anecdote, and a convenient one at that.

> Roughly 99% of startups end up going belly-up.

and later

> Roughly 90% of startups fail

I get it, a lot of them fail, but that's a massive difference. The former is a good point, the latter is not so good.

The whole article is sort of like this. Vague claims mixed with "I'm smarter than you for not trying", it's really hard to find a good and strong interpretation of what the author is trying to bring across here.

Hope is sometimes stupid, yeah, but let people try and fail, if they want. That is, after all, how we get the 1% that succeed.

I don't really see how the final paragraph follows from the preceding text... They seem like they're from two different articles - one calling out toxic work culture and deification of fundamentally flawed and faceted people, the other basically the complete opposite?

"Grinding won't help you... unless you're so stubborn that you disregard the above warnings and grind so hard you break through to success"?

Seems like this is just another test the author thinks would-be entrepreneurs need to pass, rather than actual advice.

I think the point, however poorly made, was that the odds are against you but the only way to surmount them is to know that they're against you and not care. It's a matter of disillusionment, because much like the lottery alluded to earlier in the article there's a conflict between the narrative and the statistically likely outcomes.

>Seems like this is just another test the author thinks would-be entrepreneurs need to pass, rather than actual advice.

It can be both. It's a decision point - do you accept the toxicity and the extremely long odds in exchange for the potential upside of going from zero to generational wealth in a single IPO or buyout offer? Can you fail ten times and still sleep indoors and eat food or are you betting the rent on your meditation app being different from all the others?

It’s funny I know two people who did startups, I think I think most fail the way one did, failed to get traction, slowly dissipated and after closing up shop, ended with an offer to joy another company as principal engineer.

As opposed to the other who was largely self funded, had a start of like 8 people who relied on him, kept getting enticed with exits that fell through, that grinded away at his mental health over multiple years until he went full on right wing conspiracy theorist prepper and moved his family to an off grid homestead.

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