The factors of entrepreneurship | Hacker News Reader

The factors of entrepreneurship

troutgirl.wordpress.com

20 pointsdrm2379 comments

the people who are telling you to go off on your own are also financially interested in the phenomenon of selling teams of young engineers to big companies

I can't believe people still write stuff like this. Doesn't anyone stop to think how little investors make when that happens, compared to the returns if a startup keeps going?

One of the ways I know that we're in a bubble is the frequency with which I am now meeting intelligent young men who sincerely and with every appearance of unselfconsciousness tell me that they want to be founders of startups as an alternative to joining the workforce and learning their trade.

This is really the only comment I have a problem with. Do they really say "as an alternative to learning their trade" as if the workforce is the only place to learn?

I thought the same thing then I realized she's right. If you want to learn the trade of being a corporate cube drone you're going to have a lot of trouble in a startup.

Workforce experience reminds me of the old story about the shoe salesman who goes to look for a job:

 "I have 20 years experience", he says to his prospective boss.

 "No you don't.", the interviewer replies.  "You've had 6 months of experience 40 times over."

The corporate trenches are sort of like that. You do learn some stuff, but not much, and you learn it awful quickly. 90% of the interesting aspects of my "trade" that I've learned have been on my own.

Corporate work (for developers) seems ok (but not great) for gaining domain expertise. It is a great way to meet people with domain expertise. Other than that, it's not good for much. Large organizations seem considerably less than the sum of their parts.

Overall a good article that brings up many great points. I find her first requirement of Substantial work history on a large well known product or hundreds of thousands of users or a PhD to be kind of ridiculous. She's saying in order to do a VC-backed company you need to have already "made it" in some way. That toiling in obscurity doesn't "qualify" you for running a company. I find that to be a load of bullshit. In a perfect world, in perfect cicumstances, everything will go perfect. Since this isn't perfect world, in the end only two things really matter; can you build it and are you smart enough to make it survive.

That part is basically true - to a VC, a person with "substantial industry experience" means an ex-founder or key employee that has already taken a company to tens of millions in revenue. That doesn't mean that only rich founders can start new successful companies (if it did, it'd disqualify Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, HP, etc). It means that you'll have a really difficult time getting VC funding if you don't have that track record, unless you demonstrate some other factor, like massive traffic or stellar recommendations from a founder who does meet those qualifications.

I agree. I found her article pretty spot on. Keep in mind that she starts the article by focusing on those whose financial plan is to get VC money from the get-go. I wrote about my own experience with VC's and I basically said the same. It is very difficult to get VC money unless you have a track record.

--Denny--

Denny K Miu

http://startupforless.com

Good stuff. Very relevant for our crowd.

wow she must hate men

all that needless offensive intro to her readers and that pointless ending.

she should follow her own advice starting from the "written communication skills" one.

what's the purpose of her article anyway if she hates 20ers-something that want to become founders?

anyway, just another web page in my block list added

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