Hacker News Reader

Comment by prat | Hacker News Reader

>Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

the converse of this is more surprising. The ball-park null hypothesis is that only 0.29% (290 for every 100,000 individuals) should come from family with history of entrepreneurs - but observed figure is ~50%. From this one should conclude that entrepreneurship does run in families.

View on HN

I also found this interesting. My father has run his own business full time for 20 years, and did it part time before that. I think that's a big reason I started my own business ~2000, though it certainly was not a startup as we think of the term. A lot of the reluctance to do a startup is simply fear of the unknown, or thinking there's some "secret sauce" that one doesn't know. Like most things in life that don't have a prospect of being immediately fatal, often the best advice is "Just do it"

"Fear of the unknown" - very well said. In fact, there are some communities (sindhis, marwaris, parsis in India for example) where the culture of entrepreneurship has been handed down through generations. Like getting a job is a way of life and not "unknown" in common families, entrepreneurship is not an "unknown" in families of these communities.

Would also like to point out that culture driven entrepreneurship may be slightly of a different kind than we are acquainted with (startups/VCs/business plans etc.). These people may have for example started with being a taxi driver and grown to be the owner of travel company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com