Are We Creating Entrepreneurs or Just Privileged Risk-Takers? | Hacker News Reader

Are We Creating Entrepreneurs or Just Privileged Risk-Takers?

luolink.substack.com

39 pointsluolink18 comments

This post was either written entirely by chatGPT, or mostly. Multiple instances of "...this isn't just X - it's Y."

"The contrast isn't just economic — it's philosophical."

"family wealth isn't just an advantage in entrepreneurship — it's often a prerequisite"

"entrepreneurial success isn't just about fairness — it's about creating more pathways for the next generation of innovators"

This fact doesn't undermine the value of the article - but it is frustrating for the level of LLM authorship to get to the point where I can spot this in a number of HN posts.

Yeah the writing is terrible. It also doesn't specify who "we" is until the last paragraph. There's many entrepreneurs in this country that don't have as much wealth, they just aren't in tech.

Thanks - saved me a click through.

the em dashes are just giveaways that it's llm generated

That isn't just a pattern LLM's use—it's one people use too.

But there's a whole lotta metaphor and flowery synonyms in that article too, and it all certainly feels robotic and repetitive in today's day and age.

> The thread, titled "How do parents cultivate young, famous entrepreneurial kids?" revealed insights that might make you rethink everything you thought you knew about teenage success stories.

Though I'm very curious about this sentence: that `?` at the end of the title is taking the place of a comma ending the aside about the title... but feels funky. I can't say it's wrong, but I feel like there's gotta be a better way to style it. Any English experts here?

(Also em-dashes with surrounding spaces bug me, personally.)

What is the value of this article? Having family wealth is advantageous in basically every career - so I don't get why Entrepreneurship would be any different.

It's class war rage bait for this audience.

Entrepreneurship is generally capital intensive plus you need to take the time away from your other career if you have one.

People can have writing tics, i know i do — that said, this article does read very much like a scrape-n-translate + some "summarized insights" of Chinese forum threads. While that's fully within the scope of a human blogger, it is very much in the wheelhouse of a modern LLM.

More telling rather than any specific lines or phrases, to me, is that the tone gives off a strong "i don't have a single strong feeling about this topic, i'm just transcribing others' opinions and vaguely coming up with a C2A" vibe — no human who'd bother to write a personal-opinions blog would realistically channel that energy into an 850-word essay without LLMs doing all the drudgery.

I do like the phrase "privileged risk takers"

It seems to me that many entrepreneurs are people who have substantial safety nets, where failing over and over isn't likely to ruin them

The narrative is always that they are bold risk takers, but I think the reality is that it's much easier to take risks when you are insulated from consequences

Personally, I experienced something like this in the past. I moved to a new city to try and start over at 27 years old after struggling for several years where I was. I was employed at a startup in my new city. The founder/CEO was a guy who I can only describe as enormously privileged. His parents were bankrolling him, he owned multiple properties, and he had a successful business in another industry that he built using his father's connections. He was also only a couple of years older than me, who was broke and kinda desperate

I was broke and needed to be able to afford my rent. So I had to insist that he pay me a salary, which he reluctantly agreed to do, and in exchange he basically gave me no equity in the company even though I was basically the technical lead. I was making mid-five figures and less than 1% equity as a "founding engineer" in a pretty well funded startup attempt

Maybe I would have been building my own businesses if I had the same kind of family wealth and support that he had, instead of being a fairly desperate employee

I think even "risk taker" is a stretch. If the startup failing doesn't put them out into the street, what is the risk, really?

If the only consequence of a failed start-up is that they're out a little money, it's more like gambling than actually taking a big risk like the vision many of us have for the scrappy entrepreneur putting everything on the line for their vision.

Yup!

If you can take the loss without really hurting then you're not really taking a risk, are you

That's a good point

Now apply the same logic to investors and executives at companies, who receive huge payouts because "they shoulder all of the risk"...

What's the difference

Startup used to be about sleeping in your weird uncles basement at 35 because you HAD TO, because you were hell bent on making something happen. These days it seems much more like enabling kids to go to the casino and spin the wheel.

That depends on whether or not you choose to accept VC funding or external investment, or take the alternative route of being a sustainable and debt-free concern owned entirely by its founders - with the downside that you won't be able to afford that Superbowl ad spot that your competitors use to win-over the market leaving you with a small, but loyal, customer-base.

Part of the natural progression of all things becoming casinos.

merit.

Genuine entrepreneurship is about developing experience in a technical domain and/or actually running a business. What the article calls "privileged risk taking" Danish researchers a few years ago called the "Veblenian Entrepreneur".[1]

Someone who doesn't build anything but consumes entrepreneurship as a hedonistic activity, like a socialite or influencer, cosplaying "being an entrepreneur" to hope for fame or connection and further money.

I think this is pretty real and accounts for the fact that you basically don't see any Gen Z business leaders or technologists when in the last two generations at the same age you had people like Brin, Page or Carmack. We've basically gone from real technical or academic work being translated into businesses to Discord NFT hustling. Something that looks more like Vegas than Caltech.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3479042

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