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Comment by menloparkbum | Hacker News Reader

What a bunch of bullshit. This is at best stupid business-book pith, and at worst completely irresponsible advice. The parts about using your personal cash, spending kids college fund, blowing through your retirement account are particularly egregious. The founders of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley sure didn't risk their own money building their empires. If you're starting a (failed) nightclub in Cleveland, maybe it is a different story.

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I for one agree with the author's point. I live in SV, working on a seed-funded start-up, and yes, it is a lot of personal sacrifice and risk. And, yes, a lot of founders risked their own money, careers and family relationships building their companies. Read "Founders At Work" for some examples.

I definitely would not risk my family or my retirement account, but I do know people who did and succeeded (and people who failed too, obviously).

How do companies get funded then that:

1. Aren't VC funded 2. Aren't angel funded

Before you answer, keep in mind that 550,000 businesses are started EVERY MONTH in the U.S. alone. VC's fund less than 4,000 of those each YEAR.

You must have some kind of insight that 23 million small business owners don't.

I think his point is that companies that can't get funded usually won't be successful, because there has to be something wrong with them to not get funded. Only someone who lives in the Valley and sees how easy it is for someone reasonably connected to get funded could have this attitude.

This isn't always true but there's at least some truth there.

We all know Silicon Valley is the quintessential barometer for how all companies are funded and started.

This is "Hacker News" , formerly "Startup News", not "Small Business Bad Advice News". Your post doesn't contain any real content, it is just SEO spam for your website.

way to support your empty argument above.

Stuff like this makes my brain hurt. Ok, so you wrote a post that essentially yells at people, good job. What value does this add? what problem have you solved here? Let's keep hacker news to submissions that are relatively content rich and engaging.

we'll be more judicious about what to submit considering the changing focus of the site.

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