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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Most people in this thread are conflating "entrepreneurs" and "startups". Anecdotally there are a lot more small businesses (bakers, butchers, independent bookstores, family owned clothing stores, etc.) in Europe than in the US. The people who own these establishments are every bit the "entrepreneur" the founders of Uber are.

Maybe the US has more startups on the ultra-successful end but that doesn't say much about the chances of the average person starting an average, unremarkable business.

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If we're looking at "entrepreneurs" as a source of growth, then yes, startups are what we're looking for.

If you don't start that pizza business, I'll buy my pizza somewhere else.

Startups create new markets through innovation. A Facebook-like is like the pizza business. Facebook (or its ancestors) was the market creator.

Uber has similarities with the pizza business, but it's all about transforming a business (taxi service) into something else. So it's between pizzas and Facebook.

So I guess there are various levels of disruption or creation of the market. But the pizza business is probably at level 0 of disruption/creation.

Think of Starbucks vs. your coffee shop...

> But the pizza business is probably at level 0 of disruption/creation.

There are no pizza restaurant in my town, but plenty of Indian and Chinese take-aways and one each of the big three fast-food chains.

So if a pizza business arrived it could be disruptive to the status quo, particularly if it offered something that the others didn't e.g. delivery beyond two miles or first-class vegetarian options.

Another example of simple disruption is a shop which opened offering walk-in printing. You just pop your memory stick into the machine and hit 'print'. This completely undermined the library which previously had a monopoly on printing and which took > 15 minutes by the time you waited for a librarian to authorize the printing.

Neither are particularly exciting, but both offer a disruptive service.

Well, sure, you can argue about how you want to model it. But what you're referring to is pretty clearly not what the article is about. Especially since it mentions the historic role of immigrants as entrepreneurs and so on, which in my mind I closely associate with the trope of the small-business-owning first generation American.

Yeah, I think people are confusing terms here. I'm not sure what the global trend is but this is an interesting article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2015...

I could see a lack of social safety nets, increased costs/risks of safely running a compliant business and corporate consolidation being behind this trend...

Interesting to see that entrepreneurship among the 20-34 cohort is sharply down. In marked contrast to the prevailing narrative which says we are an entrepreneurial generation.

The article mentions student debt. I'm part of that cohort, and did start a business. I'm Canadian. If I had had the average US student debt, I never would have got started.

Though the pizza shop owner isn't that unique or in large scale to help a lot of people, so the impact is far more limited. Who cares whether someone can semantically be called "entrepreneur", etc.

If they didn't do their pizza shop, no one would notice, but if we didn't have high growth startups, I think we'd feel that impact far far more.

This is not to imply that high growth = high impact, because there's of course a ton of rent-seeking bullshit out there to be condemned.

>If they didn't do their pizza shop, no one would notice, but if we didn't have high growth startups, I think we'd feel that impact far far more.

I completely fail to notice most "high-growth" startups. I do like my neighborhood pizza joints and ethnic food stores.

But hey, maybe that's because I share Peter Thiel's taste in startups.

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