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Comment by 31reasons | Hacker News Reader

I don't care if I get down voted. But if a person already has 3 kids and another on the way, why would you spend all your savings on a startup ? even if you run out of savings, why would you max out your credit ? There is something called calculated risk.

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My thoughts as well. It sucks that this failure happened -- failure does happen, and it sucks more the more people are affected by it -- but putting your kids in a position like this? Your spouse has the choice to support you, or to at least try to talk you out of either doing what you're doing or dumping all of your assets into it. Your kids don't have the understanding to know the difference or understand the situation.

Hindsight is 20/20, but people seem too often to forget that foresight can go a long way towards saving you from having to stare backwards at a disaster. Hopefully the OP learns from this and makes his future failures (because we all fail, and just doing it once would be an incredibly rare feat) more palatable to himself and his family.

Calculated risks, no matter how number of, or how precise the calculations, often still fail. The idea that all risk can be eliminated is a fallacy, as there is literally always a risk of failure unless you're already independently wealthy.

Even if you are independently wealthy, there's risk of failure: Health reasons, financial reasons beyond your control (e.g. currency hyperinflation; draconian tax measures as happened in Greece and Argentina and will likely happen in other places as well; Significant loss of finances to fraud, as in the Bernie Madoff case)

It's never possible to eliminate all risk. However, there's a difference between taking a calculated risk, and being reckless -- and reckless people more often than not believe they were taking a calculated risk. This is especially true of people with gambler personality.

(Not making an opinion about original poster - I have no info to base an opinion on. Making a general statement)

You're not wrong -- I just wanted to delineate between 'failure' and 'bankruptcy'. Clearly, if Bill Gates wanted to start a new company, the likelihood that it would bankrupt him is indeed minuscule, though not impossible. I would wager though, that unless it was exceedingly ambitious (e.g., very high risk), the possibility of him going bankrupt from any new venture is infinitesimal.

It's also perhaps worth noting that yeah, I'm also not making any value judgements on the OP, except to say that sometimes, even calculated risks are subject to sheer and utter failure, and that even playing things extremely safe, unless one has piles and piles of money, could easily lead to bankruptcy-worthy situations.

> there's a difference between taking a calculated risk, and being reckless -- and reckless people more often than not believe they were taking a calculated risk. This is especially true of people with gambler personality.

Just quoting this because it deserves to be read twice.

Sometimes I think I envy people who can think like you do.

But I find people who know what it means to be irrational are far more interesting.

Frankly there are many ways you can be irrational. Your thoughts, your actions, your creations. But don't do that at the expense of your family. If you want to take too much risk, don't start a family, heck you can even stop at 1 kid to manage risk.

The fact that he has 3+ kids and a wife seems to be relevant now that the start up has failed. So, it should have definitely been taken into consideration at the beginning.

You forfeit the freedom to be irrational when you have a child, let alone four of them.

100x this.

On a tangentially related note, what is the moral philosophy around having children? I'm not familiar with this area at all. Is having children generally considered a (or close to) a human right? Because it seems a lot of discussion about social policy (especially minimum wage) revolves around the assumption of supporting more than just oneself.

As a parent of 6, I call bullshit.

I want my kids to take risks. I want them to challenge the status quo. I want them to think for themselves. I want them to appreciate the irrational.

I don't care if they get an xbox for Christmas.

I'm pretty sure we're discussing taking risks that could move your kids into foster care because you're homeless, not the risk of not being able to afford an Xbox.

No we are not. It might be rough while the dad gets a job, but people don't go from startup founder to homeless.

... said jaxn in the thread about the guy whose home is being foreclosed upon because he lost his credit and mortgage money in a gamble.

I don't know how many kids you have or how many failed startups you have had, but I have some very relevant experience here. Give it 3 months and ask the OP if he ended up homeless.

It's always easy to criticize from the outside. I don't know the OP's details enough to make a judgement like yours.

It's not like you have another life to hedge against. what sort of life have you led if you have never pushed or tried or taken a risk. is it riskier for your kids to grow up thinking life is playing it safe.

People make stupid mistakes when chasing after their dreams. Especially when heavily influenced by survivor biased that is rampant in tech media. Its the failure that make you smart in the long run.

I agree. :-(

Because people who take these risks change the world. Failure just goes with the territory sometimes. Without entrepreneurs, you'd have life filled with many more daily aches and pains. We need to celebrate these folks. They are the real heroes of society.

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