This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. Given enough chances you will make it, big. That means the #1 factor in success is the number of chances you get to fail and try again, not necessarily how inherently good you are. I try to remind myself of this often. I have been given so many chances, and I took them.
This always sounded intuitively correct to me, but looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net. They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
Who are you thinking of? Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk all came from wealthy families. They all had the safety net of their family wealth if their business didn’t work out. Even someone who had parents to pay their student loans is relatively privileged, not everyone starts their 20’s debt-free and able to take financial risks.
Bezos’ mom had him at 17, his biological father owned a bike shop, and his mother remarried when Bezos was 4 to a Cuban immigrant who came to the country at 16 and ended up working as a petroleum engineer.
They wound up middle class after all that, but I certainly wouldn’t say Bezos came from a “wealthy family”.
Bezos' parents lent him $250k to start Amazon. The point is that by the time Bezos started Amazon they were wealthy and could provide him this safety net. Not many middle class families would be able to loan their kid that much money.
okay but $250k is still $250k right? Most people in the world, for most parts of the world, don't see that kind of money in an entire lifetime of work. Most people think privilege means a trust fund, but a $250k loan of US dollars (life-savings or not) is also a privilege that most people don't have.
i think in this thread the goalposts were slowly moved. people were initially talking about success being predicted by having the excess necessary to comfortably take many shots on goal. it seems like we've granted that this $250k shot was a one-time thing.
it is true but irrelevant to the original topic that this is more money than the global poor ever see, and that this is more money that most people get to have. i don't think anyone was arguing that this represents zero privilege
Do you have a source for that being their life savings?
Most of your points have nothing to do with their wealth. Why would it suggest they’re poor if his mom had him at 17 and was taking night classes while raising him? She wasn’t employed, that just sounds like she herself was still able to take risks beyond her means probably because her father was wealthy.
Do you have a source for that not being their life savings? It sounds like you're just making assumptions and guesses as well; if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up. Perusing the "early life" section of Bezos' Wikipedia page doesn't suggest to me that he came from money, at least. But I don't see anyone on either side of the argument presenting anything beyond that.
> Do you have a source for that not being their life savings?
I mean there are many sources that talk about the $300k he received from his family to start Amazon, it's a famous story. None of those sources mention that it was his family's life savings. I don't really know how to provide a source that says it wasn't his family's life savings, but I also can't provide a source that says he wasn't an alien from Zeta Reticula. This is generally the problem with proving a negative and why the onus is usually on the person making a positive assertion.
> if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up.
I did, I'm saying that a family that can give their son $300k to start a business in 1993 is wealthy. That would be about $674k today.
Yep, my father, with no business training or college was funded by my grandfather and was in business for years, decades. He ultimately failed without any savings and died in poverty. Being a small business owner was the only job he ever had.
My grandfather was similar--he was the first one to leave the farm life and tried several different careers and businesses. He worked for a railroad, was a realtor, owned a lumber yard, and lastly owned a delicatessen. The lumber yard nearly destroyed the entire family because he would sell on credit and then contractors failed to pay up on time. It was a huge disaster and the the thing is, this was way before the Home Depot national type chains or the "84 Lumber" regional type chains and if he had had any business acumen at all, he could have been the franchise. People don't know what they don't know. Anyways, my dad worked for my grandfather for free for several years and screwed up his life quite a bit doing so in order to "save the family" and I think my dad has told me this damn story every single time I have called him on the telephone for at least the past 30 years. His complex over the whole situation must be enormous!
This is why I never started a business myself. I figured it was a family curse to fail at business.
Bezo’s maternal grandfather worked for the Department of Energy and owned a ranch in Texas. They were wealthy enough to have $300k to give to Jeff in 1993.
Those people you mention may be examples of the exception, not the rule. Certainly many new businesses work out when they are founded by someone from a wealthy family; it would be strange if that was never the case.
But maybe it's more common that successful businesses are started by founders coming from more modest means. Page & Brin, and Jobs & Wozniak come to mind (none came from poor families, but they weren't rich either). I'm sure there are many other examples, and those are just the famous ones; there are many successful companies started by people we've never heard of.
Yeah they aren't like, outlier wealthy though. They all had lawyer/doctor/banker parents.
If having your student loans paid off for you is enough, then there are 10s of millions of people in their shoes. Why did they not succeed if that is what it takes?
I didn’t say they need to be outlier wealthy, I’m disagreeing with the assertion that it just takes focus and grit to be successful. I agree with the initial comment that it has more to do with how many chances you get to take, and being able to take chances throughout your 20’s is a relatively rare and privileged opportunity. Most people need to find gainful employment immediately after college, they can’t take 5-10 years making no money on long shot bets.
Where are you getting the figure that there are 10’s of millions of college grads in their 20’s with no debt? There are only 2 million undergraduate grads in the US every year. I think you’re probably off by a couple orders of magnitude.
>> Why did they not succeed if that is what it takes?
short answer: it's might be necessary but not sufficient.
Alex Honnold, the rock climber with some pretty spectacular solo / speed ascents was asked why no-one else has free soloed El Cap, replied "it's hard." he spent a lot of time (years) building up to it and finishing other routes, and no one else has taken these first steps yet. He goes on that they may have the talent or disposition, but not the motivation or an experience that pushes them in another direction. His perspective (similar to general outlier success) is others will do it but it takes a bunch of things all coming together, including luck.
It’s pretty clear that @Aurornis is talking about people they know personally. They literally mention that they’re talking about people they grew up with.
Whereas you are talking about a completely different group of people: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk are the survivorship bias set.
You’re talking at cross purposes with the person you’re responding to.
Think of motivation. Most people who live financially comfortable lives will want little more in the way of wealth when balanced against risk and effort. They also have something to lose. Their circumstances shift the incentives.
Now think of the temperaments of people who chase wealth. If they come from money, then the comfort they live in is not going to satisfy them. If they come from financially less than stellar backgrounds, they may be more likely to crave that kind of attainment; money is a kind of unfamiliar blank canvas onto which they can project all sorts of fantastic expectations (most of which are bogus). And unlike the better off, they have less to lose. Add to all this an inferiority complex that can compel compensation behavior. They may have a tougher start financially, but psychologically, they are more compelled by their circumstances than their wealthier counterparts.
I don't think anyone in this particular thread was necessarily reducing or equating success to money, they were merely pointing out examples in which certain folks attained financial success. The parent-most comment was referring to the importance of a safety net in order to get more chances (whether it's risking it to become a business owner, or going back to school, or whatever your definition of success is).
And it's true. If you have a good financial safety net then you can take more chances and increase the odds that your next risk will be the one that works out.
Of course, the most easily quantifiable definition of success is usually financial, and on and off HN, it's probably the most common definition of success.
For me myself, I'm grateful to be doing well financially. I grew up in an upper middle class family. But I still do want to grow my wealth. I am not going to take wild risks to do so, but I'll work hard and use my current wealth wisely to grow it. What will more wealth get me? Financial security, freedom. It'll give my wife and me the freedom to choose if we want to stay at home with the kids. It'll let us easily fund their college, or whatever education or path they decide to pursue. The goal isn't being a billionaire. It's freedom and security.
I think that's success for a lot of people, and it usually manifests itself as just having more money because that's the first step. But it's not always the end goal.
You can choose to think that op meant only the most insanely rich billionaires. I thought they meant their actual experiences with peers. Cut out the outliers and be realistic and I think it’s easier to understand the point without the extremism. The range of what people consider success is quite large.
Yes, it's a bit forced trying to turn someone's anecdotes that spur some food for thought into some kind of a categoric stance.
They asked the parent who they were thinking of, a more recent example of an "up and coming" billionaire would be Palmer Luckey, whose life experience seems to be at least consistent with his stance against optionality.
Edit: Ref
"A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy … They’re always pursuing everything with optionality. ’Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody. I need to be able to sell my business in any way. I need to have liquidity in any way. I need to make sure that I’m not closing myself off to future romantic partners. I need to make sure I’ve got my options open. I need to make sure that I’m not going to buy a house and settle down in one place and lock myself down. Oh, having children. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not ready to commit to that path."
I posted some as a reply to one of your other posts.
Why do we need well-known, public examples? I think it would be absurd to assert that there are very few successful founders that don't come from wealthy families. (Just as it would be absurd to suggest there are few that do come from wealthy families.)
Musk came to Canada with a few hundred dollars to his name. Worked on farms. Never got a loan from his dad, afaik.
It’s probably true that he could have somehow gone back to South Africa as a “safety net” if you will, but I believe that would’ve been the last thing he would have wanted.
If you’re really poor, you can’t take a plane to another country and start a new life, sure. But out of those people who could, if they scraped their resources together, how many do?
This isn’t to blame anyone. I would suppose that the vast majority of people would not want to be Elon Musk. Would not want that kind of life. But for the claim that he is what he is because it was served to him on a silver platter by his family just isn’t supported by any facts.
I hear this conspiracy theory that he's was super rich. But owning a mine could mean anything from a basically bankrupt speculator to the De Beers. There's claims he gave Musk $28k ... that's not evena decent college fund.
>His lucrative engineering business took on "large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base." He also owned an auto parts store, at least half a share in an emerald mine, and even "one of the biggest houses in Pretoria."[12] His ex-wife Maye's book recalls that at the time of their divorce in 1979, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.[13]
> As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.” [1]
The pocket emerald story that comes before that "we were very wealthy" line is even more telling. It's missing from that Independent article, but that article's based on this Business Insider interview: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-abou...
> Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewelers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’" Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. "And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200."
> A few days later the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000 -- a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem.
> Errol has used the story as on object lesson in how retail works ever since. He was surprised but not concerned by the incident, Errol says, because money was plentiful.
> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”
So his dad was so poor he kept his money in a safe ...
You can fit maybe 2 million in a safe. Maybe less if it's poorly packed, small denominations, other items in storage (id, etc). A safe full of money is like having an investment property, it's not really a sign of unreal wealth.
It's like some 20 year old on TikTok flexing a Rolex with aftermarket "diamonds" - it isn't dirt poor but it's not what you'd exactly call generational wealth. You don't even hear Trump bragging about having a ton of cash - even the crassest most trashy rich person wouldn't brag about a safe full of cash.
Half the posters here probably have parents with more assets.
Just look at how insanely biased people are here. Elon once allegedly stole $2k worth of emeralds from his dad, and they're gushing over what fabulous wealth that is.
$2k is a phone or a laptop. Elon was so madly rich he stole something as valuable as a laptop from his dad, and this is somehow evidence that he's basically a de Beers?
I know nothing about this specific situation, so I'm not speak to that. I am speaking to "why keep your wealth as cash in a safe?"
I'm old enough that grandparents lived through the great depression. I know they kept wealth in a safe. A lot of their kids did as well. The grandparents had their gold money taken away, or their cash disappeared in banks. A lot of their kids followed along.
Being gen X, Elon has parents/grandparents that lived through the great depression and world war. That along with any other local factors makes keeping wealth in a safe not that unusual.
Musk left Canada at 17, went to college in the US and sold is first business in 1999.
But I also worked at low minimum wage job at 18 at Radio Shack while living at home with my parents driving the car my parents bought me. I assure you if I have lost my job, it wouldn’t have hurt. I would just spend more time hanging out with my friends and on my $4K Mac setup.
I had a friend who started company after company starting in high school. Some were more successful than others, but he never lost his enthusiasm for the next company. The last time I saw him, he was living out of a trailer because he put everything he had into his next company. (Sadly, he passed a few years ago from an accident.) He left behind a large wake, and his memorial service was packed.
I'm not sure what point is being made here. AIUI, Musk comes from a wealthy family. Are you saying a biography would say otherwise?
I think the point people are making about the low wage jobs is that it's irrelevant. People from wealthy backgrounds take low paid jobs sometimes, so having done so doesn't imply he's a rags-to-riches story.
I'm saying Musk's company was not founded on family wealth. Even if it was, where are all the other trillion dollar companies given that lots of families have wealth?
> People from wealthy backgrounds take low paid jobs sometimes, so having done so doesn't imply he's a rags-to-riches story.
It does in Musk's case. Why not read a biography of him? It's more interesting than speculation.
Nobody said his company was "founded on family wealth". They said he had that wealth available as a cushion to fall back on should his ventures fail. They also never said "every person from a rich family can make a trillion dollar business". They claimed that those who found successful businesses are disproportionately from wealthy backgrounds, and provided a supposed mechanism: a greater ability or willingness to take financial risks knowing there is a limit
to how far they can fall if they don't pan out.
Personally, I don't have any view on whether that is correct or not but it's obviously the claim that was made. It seems plausible but I'd want to see some actual data to believe it, not just anecdotes about a few of the most famous founders. Your points about low wage jobs and other trillion dollar companies are simply not relevant to it, and if biographies of Elon Musk contain information that would refute it you haven't said what or how.
Knowing you are an extremely accomplished man and fully capable of parsing this, I have to wonder why you seem blind to it.
> Right. He'd just get a job and rent an apartment.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting homeless people are homeless simply because they refuse to go out and get a job and an apartment. But as someone who's been homeless and someone who's a friend of people who've been homeless, a very large number of homeless people bust their asses at work. Things beyond their control go wrong and they have no social safety net to fall back on.
Elon Musk could've vacationed barefoot in Southeast Asia for 5 years and still returned to be given some executive job offer, just as many other children of rich kids do. Most people don't have that level of good fortune.
> Elon Musk could've vacationed barefoot in Southeast Asia for 5 years and still returned to be given some executive job offer, just as many other children of rich kids do.
Except that is not what happened. He started doing menial jobs in Canada. He was never given some executive job offer.
You can do any job you want and take any sort of risk when you have a rich family. It's not exactly unusual for rich kids to do menial jobs to "build character" or get some experience before rocketing off to some other venture, knowing they have essentially unlimited money behind them to absorb any mistakes they might make.
I think I can safely say that about every single person I know from college with most being normies. No sane parent is gonna not put up their college student kid till they figure out their next step.
1. “Son, here is $5000 to cover your rent, utilities and food for one month while you look for another job in San Francisco” and keep doing that for 6 months
And
2. “We can’t afford to help you pay your rent so you are going to have to break your lease and come back home to East MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska. You might be able to get a job at “Big John’s Fish Tackle and WordPress Shop” and maintain the local church’s blog.
I knew my parents would be able to do a cheaper version of #1 s/Atlanta/SFO and s/Small town South GA/Nebraska.
I had a friend who I graduated with who was the oldest of three or four kids and whose mom was a single mother who couldn’t afford to subsidize him.
I was able to move to Atlanta and get a lower paying job as a computer operator based on an internship the year before because I knew that’s where I needed to be. My parents did subsidize me for the first year while I hustled my way to a better job through networking. I couldn’t have done that in small town South GA.
He ended up moving to a slight bigger small town on the border of GA and Alabama that paid more, lower cost of living and lower opportunities
There’s no way you didn’t know anyone whose parents couldn’t put them up for a year. There are lots of people who go to college who’s parents don’t have 30k spending money
And then they are in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska and having to maybe move from where the jobs are and where they can network. It is expensive to subsidize their living away from home.
Laughable that you believe this. Do you still after seeing all the counter evidence? Do you sit back and ask yourself, "I wonder if the world's richest man has a PR firm, one so effective it has me working for it part time spreading the lies."?
I've seen quite a few of these funded entrepreneur-lifestyle kids now; I've worked (briefly) with many of their companies. Many of them are making enough of a real go at it such that I can't tell them from others, but quite a few don't know enough about how a default alive business works and deliver a DoA even when the core idea or a short pivot works and has traction - these guys need so much better PMF to succeed.
The best businesses I've seen parents find for their children are lettings agents (urgh) and basic manufacturing (last mile door assembly etc.). You can get the business model in a six month course, the staff are minimum wage, the product is high margin. If your parents buy the building you are so close to default alive its a joke. Grow the business, flip it, and try the big idea.
Then let’s control for that. Among people with a decent safety net, can we correlate eventual success with number of tries?
The answer seems self evident, but idk for sure, and I would like to know the Gini coefficient of successes vs failures among safety netters be that of non-safety netters. Wouldn’t we expect the successes within the safety net to be massively larger on average than those of the non-safety netters, given that a safety net affords you so many more swings to take? Your comment suggests that this is not the case, driven by the selection/survivor effect within non-safety net
In a thread about survivor bias, and you fall for the same trap. How many people coming from wealthy background end up failing?
Take Bill Gates, his father cofounded a law firm, and his mother was a board members of several firms. That is a very wealthy background, but not outrageously so. How many people of the same level of wealth became successful businesspeople? It's said that his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO at the time was a more instrumental factor to his eventual success than his family's wealth, and his own effort of course.
> It's said that his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO at the time was a more instrumental factor to his eventual success than his family's wealth, and his own effort of course.
This sounds a lot like "his family's wealth was a more instrumental factor than his family's wealth" since "being on a board" is pretty rarified air. It's not Gates-himself-level wealthy, but what percentile is that? 90th? 95th? 99th?
When IBM came knocking, Bill Gates referred them to Gary Kildall. Kildall (for whatever reason) muffed the deal, and Gates didn't pass on that opportunity again. Gary had the opportunity, and came from a middle class company. He invested in his company with his own resources.
Gates received $5000 from his family for his business.
I've read accounts of Microsoft's early days. It was self-sustaining very quickly.
I also know something about compilers and interpreters. BASIC of that era was simply not difficult to create. Yes, Gates & Allen had access to a PDP-10 at Harvard which helped. But it was not required, as Woz proved by writing Apple BASIC in a notebook and hand assembled it.
I also know that Hal Finney wrote a BASIC in 1978 or so that fit in a 2K EPROM (for Intellivision). As I recall, it didn't take him very long.
So no, Microsoft is simply not a result of massive infusions of money. An awful lot of people had the ability to create Microsoft, what they lacked was vision, drive, and willingness to risk.
And no, Gates and Allen were not going to starve if they failed, even without their parents' money.
Not the OP, but I can name many: Andy Grove (Intel) , Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Page, Sergei Brin (Google), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Michael Dell (Dell).
They all seem to come from solidly middle or upper middle class, so no poverty but not different than many of us on HN.
The argument was not that you had to be rich, just that you had a safety net so you could take risks and know you had a fallback without being homeless and hungry.
But the Google cofounders specifically both had parents who were early computer scientists or mathematicians
In all fairness, I haven’t been consistent between “coming from enough money that your parents can be your angel investors” and “you can afford to fail and call your parents for help with the rent”.
Your question is naming just one not coming from money. None of the people I listed did.
Wealthy background surely helps immensely, but other factors such as environment are vital as well. Google founders met at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the height of the dotcom era. That’s more important than their background.
Being wealthy is not the most important factor to one’s success. 50% of US population is middle class. Even if those I listed were all upper middle class, that would still be perhaps 5% of US population, or millions of people. Yet only a few rise to the top.
While not a tech company founder, Oprah Winfrey created a media empire. She was born to a teenage mother in rural Mississippi (and poverty).
If someone wants a story about overcoming one's lot in life through grit, hard work and making the most of situations/opportunities her story is one you'll want; maybe not as relatable as the Bezos, Dell, Jobs, Musk etc but a story that poverty->billionaire entrepreneur can happen. There is also a reason she is the only one I can think of that fits description.
Jensen Hung’s father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He wasn’t going to be homeless and on the street if he failed.
And he didn’t come straight out college either. He worked at AMD and I’m sure he had established some type of financial foundation and I’m sure he could have easily found a job if Nvidia failed with his background.
>>Jensen Hung’s father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He wasn’t going to be homeless and on the street if he failed.
So now the goalposts are "isn't desperate" while a while ago it was "came from money". Having caring parents and being raised in culture that value education help. No one is arguing that.
>>And he didn’t come straight out college either. He worked at AMD and I’m sure he had established some type of financial foundation and I’m sure he could have easily found a job if Nvidia failed with his background.
He needed to get a job first like a average person before starting his own company. Privilege!
Huang's family must have had interesting connections if you consider that the daughter of his cousin is running AMD. And both were born in Taiwan and then went to MIT, which seems unlikely to happen without family money.
Bezos’s mom was his first investor, giving him $300K.
Then he also had connections to millionaires through his family
Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Gates, was instrumental in securing Microsoft's first major deal with IBM through her connections. His family was wealthy and provided connections and support
What about Replit? Two guys in a coffee shop in Jordan, you cannot be much further from Silicon Valley. They got turned down four times from YC and decided never to try again. But pg fell in love with the startup and urged him to try again. Then during the interview one of them got into a heated argument with Michael Siebel and thought for sure he had failed.
Yet he got in without a wealthy family and an American Ivy League degree. There are lots of other examples, I can even think of a one in Michigan.
Sure, but if Bill Gates was a drug addict with no software, there would have been no deal and he certainly wouldn't have been successful.
Whenever I see the topic of success, people LOVE to talk about 'survivorship bias' as a way to somehow discredit the person that is successful and also give an excuse as to why they might not be successful.
It's pretty destructive in a community that's supposed to be about startups and building businesses. This is why I originally came here years ago, but it seems like the mindset has shifted to anti-capitalist group think.
No one is discrediting his success. It’s just the banal idea of if you have “grit” and work really hard, you are somehow guaranteed success or even have more than a slim chance.
Find companies that make a lot of money and convince them to give you some of that money in exchange for your labor if you want the best risk/reward ratio.
I would much rather be in the position of an intern I mentored who at 22 made over $700K in gross income between cash and RSUs (that could easily be converted into cash unlike “equity” in private companies) their first four years out of college than some struggling founded trying to start yet another AI company so grateful they got $200k from YC while still eating beans and rice that they had to split among three founders.
If you can buy a house for $300k, you can invest the money instead. If you choose "house", you're going to have a much harder time accumulating wealth.
I wish I hadn't bought a house instead of investing it all in MSFT. I know people at the time who borrowed every dollar they could and plowed it into MSFT. They became very, very wealthy. I was too chicken. Bwaaack, cluck cluck!
You never hear about the people who made bad investments.
Or everyone who invested their life savings, refinanced their house, withdrew everything from their 401K and still failed.
If you have a paid off house you have some place to live, the alternative is to be paying rent that goes up every year.
My rent in 2016 before I had my house built was $1800. My mortgage was $2300. By 2024, rent had gone up at the same place to $2400. My mortgage besides property taxes and insurance won’t go up nearly as much[1]
It reminds me of people in BigTech that don’t sell their RSUs as soon as they vest and diversify. I make just as much now in cash as I did in BigTech with the difference being 40% was in RSUs. Why would I keep 40% of my income in AMZN any more than I would take 40% of my cash income and put in AMZN?
[1] Anecdotely I sold in 2024 at exactly twice the price I had a built for in northern Atlanta and bought a condo in state tax free central Florida for half the price.
I am criticizing the idea that all it takes is “grit” and if you work really hard you will succeed.
Thought experiment: 10 people out of college take “huge risks and work really hard”. A second set of 10 people just get boring enterprise Dev jobs and the third set all work in BigTech for 10 years. Rank the three groups in the order of expected median total income over the decade?
> I am criticizing the idea that all it takes is “grit” and if you work really hard you will succeed.
Ok, but I did not suggest that.
Working hard is not good enough. It's necessary to work at the right things - and it is hardly obvious which are the right things. Taking risks is also necessary. The bigger the risks, the bigger the potential gains.
But nothing is guaranteed.
Spending one's youth playing video games diminishes your chances of financial success to around zero.
Someone working in BigTech making over a quarter million a year less than 3 years out of college has a much better chance of success and playing video games after working 8 hours a day 5 days a week than a “founding engineer” or even a founder of yet another YC backed AI company doing “996”.
> It reminds me of people in BigTech that don’t sell their RSUs as soon as they vest and diversify. I make just as much now in cash as I did in BigTech with the difference being 40% was in RSUs. Why would I keep 40% of my income in AMZN any more than I would take 40% of my cash income and put in AMZN?
I mean, I didn't sell my RSUs as soon as they vested, because I worked for a BigTech company that I believed was on the upswing, and I was willing to take that risk of not selling.
Sure, it is an equivalent of buying those shares on your own, but again, it still felt way safer (and way more flexible/liquid, as I could sell my shares at any moment) to me than working at a startup with extremely illiquid equity. And I was already pretty much broke with no safety net (my internship over the summer back then made me more than my entire family combined earned in ~6 months; this is not an internship flex, there were plenty that paid more, this is just to illustrate the gap between some bigtech internship salaries and what my family was making), so I was willing to take the risk.
The risk ended up paying off, and that BigTech company went from ~$60/share to $300+/share in barely 5 years, turning my initial stock grant into a lifechanging amount for someone in my position. No, it isn't even close to being enough to buy a house outright or retire, but it is my (and my family's) safety net now. I can afford to help my sister pay rent with zero "can i actually afford it" thought in my mind.
TLDR: yes, not diversifying is risky. However, you cannot make lifechanging money without taking risks, whether it is through joining a promising startup or not diversifying your investments or anything else. I am not advocating anyone to do what I did, as I agree with you that selling RSUs on vest is the most safe option. There are no totally safe options for making lifechanging (whatever that means for you) amounts of money, so you gotta pick your poison, if that's something you want. For me personally, making bigtech salary at a company that I believed was on the upswing (and saving a good amount of it), while keeping all vested RSUs in my account (and selling no more than 5% of it each year), was an acceptable level of risk (that I wouldn't regret doing, even if the price of those shares ended up dying significantly).
I wouldn't assume size of success is correlated with "having success or not." It's notoriously hard to predict what business ideas will succeed at all, let alone be mega-billion-success-stories. Many things could've gone differently leading to Bezos being a ten- or hundred-millionaire vs a multi-billionaire even in worlds where Amazon was successful. AWS, for instance, was not in the original plan.
I think the strongest correlations would be between:
"has safety net" and "has success" - one major factor here is not having a poverty mentality that would lead to panicking and quitting early
as well as between "has safety net" and "takes multiple swings if no initial success", for the direct reason of "can afford to do so."
I believe we all intuitively push whatever our advantages are, often without even knowing it. The advantage that the wealthy have are connections, capital, and familial support. These advantages lend themselves to activities such as starting businesses with high capital requirements, accumulating assets (“investing”), working through elite colleges to land a prestigious position, heading a philanthropy or charity, etc.
That advantage comes with a disadvantage. Because the wealthy do not have to work to earn their start, they never learn what hard work is capable of producing, and never build the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” habit. What they have in money, they lack in grit. When they are faced with a challenge, they habitually say “what can I buy to solve this problem?”, “who can I consult to help me with this problem?”, etc.
Contrast that with folks who are working class. They know that they don’t have the advantage of money. They learn that hard work is the behavior that yields the best outcome. They put themselves in fields where what you get is proportional to what you put in, such as the trades, where working long, hard hours can generate quite good income.
When folks who were raised working class are faced with adversity, they handle the situation like Boxer from Animal Farm: “I will work harder”. It’s what they know how to do. While they don’t have copious sums of money to fall back on, or other natural advantages, their own work ethic is one of the few things that cannot be taken away from them, and so they leverage that.
That advantage also comes with disadvantages. Someone who works very hard will likely be overly self reliant. They might not get as much done as they could have had they spread the load across other people. They might burn themselves out, injure themselves, work to the exclusion of all other goals in life, etc.
These are vast generalizations that obviously won’t hold in all circumstances, but I think it’s useful to illustrate the point. People use the tools at their disposal, whether that be money or otherwise. Those strategies all have advantages and disadvantages. The net result of those is likely visible in the outcomes of various people, I’d bet.
I’d expect it to stratify based on the kind of business.
Typical small businesses (plumbing, HVAC, restaurants, convenience stores) I’d expect to come from poorer families. These businesses are a potential avenue to success without traditional credentials, and they’re not the sort of thing somebody is likely to start as a passion.
From wealthy families, I’d expect vanity businesses. There wouldn’t be as much motivation for the annoying aspects of a real business. And anyone who is interested in business can probably get a nice start in something their family owns or has a major stake in.
Moonshot companies I’d expect to come from the upper middle class, children of doctors and such. Not fabulously wealthy, so the potential for making millions can still be a big motivator. But comfortable enough to get advanced schooling and be willing to aim big with a chance of failure, rather than going for something mundane you know is always in demand, like fixing pipes.
Off the top of my head, Gates, Page, and Zuckerberg all fit that mold.
Good to share, but n=1 I suppose. For me (also n=1) it's the opposite in my circle. The ones without resources never went anywhere and reproduced their parents' class. The ones with resources that went into entrepreneurship (and had the possibility of failing and still being fine) are the most successful.
Agreed on your final point though! Tenacity probably is the biggest driver.
Every single western "entrepreneur" who starts making a little more than 100k/year likes to tell itself this story.
Did you have any (real, not GenZ) mental or physical disability?
Did you have a house to come back to every day? Did you have a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wanted?
Did you have a community that supported you through your business?
Did you have a legal structure around you that allowed you not to worry about getting kidnapped/killed? A structure that enforces getting paid after you've earned your money?
98% of what you have was given.
I do agree, however, that a lot of people don't even bother to put in the remaining 2%.
“Can you start a business without $10m of family capital” is a societal question.
“Can you start a business on an empty stomach without a roof over your head” is not the same debate. A roof over your head is a prerequisite to almost everything else in life - starting a business is WAY down the list. Better to have societies work to provide food and roofs - which they do, with varying degrees of success.
People without those things cannot play the lottery as many times as those who have them. They might not even get to play it once.
If everyone around you has all of those basic human needs met, you are the exception.
But of course people don't like to hear this, because their whole meritocracy myth (which has always been trash) comes falling down and they might be forced to admit that, please excuse me for making this outrageous statement, ... you're just an average person with slightly better luck than others.
(It is true, however, that "luck" compounds through your life and even more through generations, though. But that even detracts from the meritocracy myth even more, as the family you're born in greatly defines what you'll achieve.)
Becoming an entrepreneur happens most of the times merely for advancing one's personal financial success. But, another side of it, which doesn't usually get attention, is that you become a beneficial factor for the society at large, because you are assumed to be doing something good and appreciated by others to earn that money. (Otherwise, earning money without being willingly paid, would make you just a criminal). You are right, this "compounds through your life and even more through generations". Especially through generations. This is how the prosperous societies got here - people doing all sorts of things that led to prosperity. If you don't not live in a society like that, then your business should be building a society first. Put your brick in the wall.
It also means that, unless the state of the environment you're in has some "force majeure" as a cause, then the people that were before you haven't done that of a good job building one either. That's not an individual failure, that's generations of failure, don't you think?
And lastly, if the environment you described is the one you're residing in, that means you're far removed from that of the entrepreneur's (you're casting judgement on) and from his/her stance. How can that lead to a caracter judgement worth anything?
I don't think anyone believes the idea of meritocracy applies to starving homeless slaves.
Luck is often the deciding factor in meritocracy, but we also make our own luck. You can have all the privleges in the world and still end up as a failson, it happens all the time.
What’s even funnier when I hear that my thought is “congratulations I guess??”. They are now making less than an average mid level developer doing CRUD enterprise dev 3 years out of school in any major metro area in the US.
That’s not even considering that the intern I mentored in 2021 is now making in the low $200s as an SA at BigTech at 25.
Growing up I thought that my family was rich because my parents were still together, we owned a home with a foundation with help from the bank, and my family was clean. It turns out the bar was real low in my hometown.
"...didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net" As someone who grew up considered both a dirt poor hick by the city slickers and simultaneously a carpet-baggin outsider, this is often a relative perspective, how do we calibrate against a larger population?
These are the sorts of things I picked up on growing up: Could they go to college if they wanted to? Did their parents go to college? Did they live homeless, apartments, trailers, multi family, single family homes, McMansions? 0/1/2 parents around?
I suspect HackerNews may have some survivorship bias compared to national averages, (and especially where I grew up).
If most successful entrepreneurs are from ordinary backgrounds, one explanation is that most entrepreneurs, successful or unsuccessful, are from ordinary backgrounds. Another is that wealthy families might be pushing kids into entrepreneurship who lack the talent or taste for it.
> over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know
This very much sounds like survivorship bias to me.
But more importantly, I think the discussion is going off the track. The important ones are the 0.1%, not the 1% or 10%. The "normal" millionaire business owner usually actually worked for it (unless they are pure finance or something similar). They are also not the ones shifting a whole country's politics with their enormous influence. They don't have any over-inflated influence over anything. They are not the problem.
But they also don't serve as examples for the masses, because that would be confusing "anyone can do this" with "everyone can do this" - their successes don't scale. You can only have that many successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, the majority must be their worker bees by necessity.
I see such discussions as distractions. If you talk about normal entrepreneurship you will not get to the core of our problems, not at the very top (the super rich), not at the bottom (why are so many so poor).
If you want to come up with an idea that works at scale you can't use one that only works for some no matter what. If you want to come up with a solution for the enormous imbalances looking at those normal entrepreneurs does not help either.
I suggest to develop an instinct to use in these kinds of discussions: For every concrete example, imagine it at scale. Thinking at individual examples when you talk about big things is a mismatch. Those examples are only useful if you use them to extrapolate upwards, what would actually happen if everybody did this?
If the most important factor in survivorship is number of chances you can take; and the number of chances is proportional to how much wealth you have; then the survivorship bias should go the other way. Otherwise it’s overwhelmed by something else, perhaps the sheer ratio of the differing populations.
When did you meet the successful entrepreneurs and business owners? Because unless you met them when they were starting out survivorship bias would account for that.
Peter used to say, that every successful company could look back at a defining moment early on, where they would have died had it not been for the courage, and the tenacity, and maybe the insanity of one visionary person who put it all on the line, even though it seemed like a huge mistake at the time.
A moment where all the metrics and the numbers didn't mean anything.
It was all about the emotion. It was about belief, rational or irrational.
The whole idea of succeeding by “grit” makes way too many people too idealistic and unrealistic.
Don’t get me wrong, Peter Drucker (hopefully that’s the Peter you are referring to) had some great actionable advice. But believing in yourself and having grit is about as banal as “thoughts and prayers”
You know what? This is indeed where courage, tenacity, and risk-taking make a difference.
But what makes the difference in whether or not we hear about it is pure luck and survivor bias.
If their luck was just right that with all that push in the right time the deal came through or the product sold, then we hear about what a great success it was, and how important was their grit.
And many smart determined people with all the courage, tenacity, and risk-taking in the world have also taken the big risk, but dice did not roll their way, or the hill was just so steep it didn't work, so we hear nothing of them. And their number likely vastly exceeds the few for whom it did work.
At one point in Tesla's path, Musk was down to a net worth of $200k or so. He laid his entire fortune on the line. How many of us would be willing to do that? Not me.
I did say, "I'm not sure there's anything aspirational there."
But clearly it does have a chance at success, as evidenced by Elon. Or, as it always turns out, it's difficult to fail anywhere but up when you're wealthy.
This is distorting my words in such tiny, pedantic, strawmanful ways I don't see a point in replying properly. I'm clearly not going to be the person to break through your illusion.
In that discussion you seemed to agree that there's not much we can or should do about it; you seemed to be indicating that you were just contemplating the phenomenon, rather than complaining or arguing that something needed to be done.
For what it's worth: the “celebrity” effect works both ways. Sure, some members of the community may be more willing to give them a pass. But other users will be more motivated to downvote and/or flag, even if the comment is relatively benign.
At a young age and knowing I could easily get a job and rebuild? Why not? $200K to get back is a year a two in Silicon Valley just working in a tech company.
By 2010 with a combination of divorce and over investing in real estate before the financial crisis I had a negative net worth of over $200K at 36 years old and absolutely no money in the bank. I really didn’t stress at all. They were just numbers.
I had a job, a home and parents who could help me out a little when needed mostly for unexpected expenses because my credit was also shot by 2013 with 5 foreclosures/short sales.
At 51, remarried for 15 years and grown (step)kids and working remotely, and a lot of other quality of life changes, we are good.
Young and knowing your future earning potential? That’s. I different than paying $200K for college. That’s only slightly more than the average new grad makes working at any of the BigTech companies their first year.
What else was he going to do? Hoard it in a High Yield Savings account?
I also disagree with the GP (with the definitive explanation; it's probably at least partially true), but this:
>> basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net.
is not statisically accurate; you're only looking at survivors. The successful Gates/Zucks/Musks might outnumber the poor Indian kids; we need both the failure counts and some sort of qualitive definition of success/failure (i.e. a rich-kid failure is probably not life destroying)
Is this statistically true or just your experience? I'd be very surprised if it was more than just anecdotal.
> They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Lots of well-resourced kids do this and more can do this. By the law of averages they should be overrepresented in successes here.
> When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
Does needing to succeed make businesses succeed? I don't think so, tbh.
If so, this is one of the questions that matters most when assessing whether or not there was a safety net— in failing, did they either wind up at the destitute/homeless/food-bank level, or a mountain of unpaid debt holding back future endeavors?
If the ones who met with failure didn’t face these things or something comparable then they did have safety nets.
The defeatist attitude in the reply’s to this comment are unreal. Try hard or don’t. It’s up to you. At least with the one way you might have a chance.
Acknowledging e.g. people who grow up in multilingual households usually have an easier time learning a new language than someone who didn't shouldn't just be about what decision an individual should make for themselves, it's about identifying what stimulates that kind of growth so we get more of that success overall. I.e. making a decision or not to go for the chance myself is a different topic than trying to find ways to increase the chances for everyone.
Economic growth is not a 0 sum game so why talk about the situations around it from only an individual gain perspective. If a lot of individuals are saying some situational factor makes the choice unreasonably hard then that's something worth focusing on rather than dismissing.
Acknowledging reality isn't defeatist. It's very likely that successful entrepreneurs statistically do come from richer families. We shouldn't ignore this fact because it's more fun and emotionally rewarding to us to pretend otherwise
Most attempts fail and if you get into debt you don’t get to try again.
I agree that it takes a special kind of person to try and try again, but it clearly is not for everyone.
A lot has to come together, you need to be alone, have a very supportive partner or be a sociopath (willing to drag your family down with you). You need to be in the right place (or have the means to move there). This usually works when you are young, so definitely having starting capital from somewhere works. This was much easier in the marking moments of technology where any simple tool or game could be transformed into cash. Nowadays you really need to luck out.
Europe has generally better safety net and much less entrepreneurship spirit for example. So it pushes both ways.
I guess one last thing is this weird thing in the US where investors somehow like people who previously failed. Like Elizabeth Holmes who reportedly went from prison right back into the game. With that environment of course it makes sense to just try again.
> looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net
There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).
That's kind of true. If you have a safety net, you kind of make the wrong decisions, optimize stuff that doesn't cut through the noise and leave something on the track. It's like that scene in Dark Knight Rises where he only makes the impossible jump out of the prison when he doesn't have the safety rope.
Would be interesting to run the priors on this and say what is the probability of startup success given "rich" "middle class" and "poor".
Otherwise maybe more poor people try startups so success will be biased towards them (rich will take over daddy or mommy business... maybe take a shot at a startup for fun but say meh lets try the business, plus there are waaaaay fewer rich).
Or to put it another way: Most people who live >100 are also from modest backgrounds too. As are olympic gold winners. Us paupers are the best!
you can extend that to all Silicon Valley and the US in general.
It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
> Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
Probability: highly unlikely.
Speaking for Europe, I see a lot of silent innovation. No press, no LinkedIn posts, not an article on their website. There are a lot of US firms that shop in Europe for high tech. (I know of instances were the US company buys the IP from the EU supplier + take public credit for it + forbids the supplier for showcasing their success in public.)
What is different is:
1) the amount of money available in the US. The US enjoyed a very beneficial position post-WOII, enabling them to run high deficits.
2) the US has a positive attitude to entrepreneurship. You are not a failure when your company goes bankrupt, you learn from it and you go-go-go.
EU countries also have very high tax rates, which feels like the community is the primary beneficiary of your business, not you the entrepreneur. This alone severely reduces the financial incentive of starting a business. There's also some weird cultural stigma in the EU's more socialist countries (like France), where the system is way more comfortable for you as an employee rather than a risk taker. Let's call a spade a spade.
The way you say it, it sounds like the EU shouldn’t have any companies at all, but that is not true. In fact, the EU is very good at boring tech, which is the reason why the US is imposing high tariffs.
Most of the US graduates have their degree and a network to fall back on. It's nice to have actual money in the bank, but it can also be acceptable to have a high chance of getting a rewarding job if the moonshot doesn't work.
In other words, human capital.
Most of the entrepreneurs I meet are not going to be homeless if things don't work out. They'll be employed.
Exactly this many also have parents who can help subsidize them, stay on their parents health insurance until they are 26 and worse case move back home. This isn’t just the privilege rich, this can also be your mid to mid upper income couple who can help their kids out.
Yep, and most of these fallbacks are insurance-like: you can always say you never asked your parents for anything. Like me. Thing worked out, so I didn't need their money. But if they hadn't, I would have a place to sleep and eat.
"But if they hadn't, I would have a place to sleep and eat."
Forgive me for asking, but (if it's acceptable to reduce it to that) isn't joining the army or something gets one covered? The army service would come with the added bonus of not letting you go soft in perseverance and risk taking areas.
Europe innovates. What it creates less are large monopolies. What America creates much more then Europe is winner takes all markets with little competition and large powerful companies on top.
Necessity is too fallible though, if Bezos was driven by necessity he would have sold Amazon in 1996 and retired.
That level of success requires either just pure psychopathic drive or some kind of deep anger that forces you to keep proving yourself again and again.
Beyond the lack of safety nets, etc., we just have a culture in the USA where you continually have to compete to prove your value as an individual.
There was some story I read where Farmers wanted to get immigrant laborers to work longer hours, so they offered a temporarily increased hourly rate. Like for the next month we pay $5/hr instead of just $3. The thought was workers would work like mad to hoard as much of the increased rate as they could. The opposite happened, they started working less because they just wanted $X/month and then to relax the rest of the time. That always stood out to me as a stark example that our American psychology is not at all universal, and is kind of perverted in certain lights.
In some areas and for some people, Medicaid probably does count as proper healthcare. But it certainly doesn't for other people / other places. Imagine there being one doctor within a multi-million person metro area who takes Medicaid for some sub-specialty. 90 minutes away from you by car. And you don't have a car. This is the reality for millions of Medicaid recipients, including ones I know personally in Chicago.
Not Medicaid, subsidized ACA. I know a lot of young healthy people that just take the chance of not having health care. Worse case you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip if you have to go the emergency room.
I don’t think my older (step)son has had insurance since he got off our plan at 26 over two years ago.
Sure, although in some areas healthcare is effectively unavailable to Medicaid plan members because providers have stopped accepting those patients. Being insured doesn't mean much if you can't schedule an appointment.
It's like a baseball game. Most people are benched their whole lives. They never get a chance at the plate. More privileged people with a lucky combination of the right family, the right education, the right timing, and the right opportunity get an at-bat, and they'll either strike out, or hit the ball. A few very lucky people will get to stand at the plate maybe once or twice more.
The wealthy get infinite at-bats. They get to stand at the plate for however long they want, and swing and swing until they get their home run. I worked with a founder like this. He would always talk about his business's humble beginnings, starting from a garage and so on--you know the story. What he would neglect to admit was this was like his 7th try. Every time he failed, he'd just chill on his family's couch, dreaming up his next startup idea.
I think it was Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) that talked about a similar concept as well. Ignoring the 10k hour thing, it also talks abut small compounding advantages that later add up to more opportunity (for those that take it).
To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill.
There was also a similar concept floating around about darts, where the poor get maybe one dart to throw, middle class a few and wealthier get many. But I can't remember where I saw or read that
Baseball isn't popular world-wide. The most popular game here is football (that sport which USA calls soccer).
Darts would be a funny way to make the analogy. It is very much a sport performed by people from the low class, since it is relatively easy to perform and practice in pubs. But you still need to have some money to buy a beer at a pub, ie. it ain't the homeless playing. The most poor people can barely afford their rent, and work off their ass doing so. Single mother with three jobs has near 0% to start a successful business.
The description sounds like a part 2 or updated approach/angle to Mindset (Carol Dweck), a book that made a changing impact when I first read it, but reading the updated edition years later left me wanting more. I had also read a couple of Adam Grant's earlier books and enjoyed them, will definitely check out Hidden Potential.
This is not true. No matter how many different teams I try out for, I as a 51 year old short male with a limp will never be a star basketball player or ever make it to even the D leagues.
There are plenty of people who tried repeatedly to “succeed” in their own company and failed. Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress
> Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress.
Some people would succeed eventually, others wouldn’t. I think it’s really hard to effectively gauge what the chances are cause you’ll see a lot of survivorship bias and a bunch of grifters with courses and blogs and stuff that try to pass it off as a reproducible skill.
I wonder what dataset would show real world outcomes well, especially since failed startups won’t be catalogued as well as people trying to enter the dining business and most of them going under.
If you'd work for decades in the Baltics, let's not even assume just software development, in absolute terms you wouldn't make that much: the median salary is below 2k EUR per month, the taxes also make a dent, as do the expenses.
So with living relatively frugally and having 1000 EUR of disposable income per month, and a similarly optimistic savings rate of 5%, each month you'd be able to put away about 50 EUR, or 600 EUR per year. You can calculate how that might compound with investments but you're putting away 6k per decade.
Obviously it's better for software developers, but there might also be unexpected expenses along the way, and so on but the overall trajectory is clear - depending on the life circumstances, working a 9-5 will ensure you live pretty poorly and that might lead to higher risk tolerance for entrepreneurship (or crime, go figure).
As for those born (or living) in a prosperous country, good for you! The equation shifts there a whole bunch, as well as depending on class or other opportunities.
See my other comment about being able to create a product and not having a go to market strategy or sales is like thinking just because I can dribble doesn’t mean I would succeed in the NBA.
I think the level of success one wants also require having a check for delusion and realism. If a "51 year old short limp" thinks they are going to be a star basketball player, they are delusional and no longer realistic.
How many people right here on HN have you seen over the years who built something and had no idea about marketing or a go to market strategy or knew anything about sales?
That’s the equivalent of a 51 year old with a limp not being self aware enough to know that I don’t have the skills to be a basketball player just because I can dribble.
If your energy is finite (which is normally the case), the effect may also depend on the energy per shot you spend. A birdshot allows you to hit great many possible targets, but only very weakly. A buckshot hits fewer targets, but packs a bit more punch. A FMJ bullet shot from a sniper rifle allows you to hit an exact target with a great force, but you have to choose carefully.
What worked for me best was looking around a lot, identifying a few worthy targets, and aiming well.
Both Romans and Mongols have lost/retreated many battles. They just had to regroup and raise another army over and over again. Some of their opponents could not even afford the war even after winning over them multiple times.
The other sides simply were more fragile, where you were defending and once your city falls, you are done.
Avoid risk of ruin. Keep the ability of taking multiple shots with upside in your favor.
The key ingredient is the courage to try, not the safety net. Countries lauded for their strong safety nets are not overflowing with people taking ambitious risks. Often quite the opposite; the strong safety net reflects a cultural aversion to risk.
People with the courage to try don’t need a safety net to do it. In practice they seem to be almost inversely correlated.
An important aspect not mentioned is feeling like you will be adequately rewarded if your calculated risks pay off. This seems to be more pertinent than safety nets in practice.
That is insightful. Courage to take risks means higher standard deviation in outcomes, more visible successes, but also more hard failures. Risk averse cultures have more stable outcomes, no big successes, but also less financially crippling failures. A personal or social safety net may or may not make you risk averse. Taking semi-calculated risks seems like a skill that needs to be learned for successful entrepreneurship.
That said, being inherently good also helps. I know (several) people who knocked it out of the park with literally their first attempt out of university in their early 20s. It wasn't just luck, they are genuinly unusually talented.
Not sure I 100% agree. First: you can temper you ambition and thus the risk. You do not need to go ALL IN for almost anything. It may take longer or be fractional vs. the initial ambitions but probably also far more realistic. Second: the counter example of succeeding because you NEED to; the "burn the ships!" approach. If you know you can fail it inevitably tempers your efforts too. You might not want to do this if you're the sole bread winner for an entire family, but when you're young and independent? Maybe. Combine this with the first and I think there's lots of paths to success.
I dunno... based on having worked for ~10 small to midsize companies now and getting to interact frequently with the founders at almost all of them, I wouldn't say a safety net was the common thread.
They were however all highly driven, a bit sociopathic, insanely confident and had some kind of chip on their shoulder. A few wanted to "beat daddy", some had wealthy wives and wanted to fit in with their in-laws, and others just seemed mad at something or someone in their industry and wanted to outdo them.
The #1 factor for success imo is being angry with reality and being arrogant enough to think you should impose your will on it. People who are given infinite chances will just fail a few times and settle into a safe life.
That sounds good, but with a safety net, are you really going to be hungry enough to make sure your one shot at getting out of the ghetto doesn't fail? The entrepreneur that says to themselves, if this doesn't work, I'll just ask mom for another $300k at St Barts over Christmas doesn't sound like the one sleeping under the desk at the office to get the demo ready for TechCrunch Disrupt. Or maybe they are (to prove daddy wrong). The human condition contains multitudes.
My wife and I are starting to test this theory. We are putting our kid in an expensive school, then starting a business to support our lifestyle. If we fail, our kid’ll have to go to a cheaper school and we’d have lost a few years of school fees. If we succeed, yay.
By the time, our are faced with the choice, our kid will be embedded in school so ripping them out of it is going to be a tough choice.
So, yeah, we’re essentially burning our boats and fighting to survive.
Don't live above your means because an unexpected event is likely to happen. Plus creating a situation where all peers are rich and only your kid is not doesn't open the doors to future success compared to if they were at their peers lifestyle level.
We grappled with this too but in the end, our decision was influenced by our parents choosing to live beyond their means to put us through good schools and college. If they could grit their teeth and sacrifice for us, we can do the same for the next generation.
Our choice us somewhat made easier because we didn’t like any of the schools near us except this one. The others were focused on exams/results and were larger in size so felt more “corporate”.
I too have made this choice with my family.. and its one hell of a positive force-factor. My mom immigrated from Kiev, with nothing and a dream for her son to have a better life in NYC. Im now taking the same risks as a 5-time entrepreneur..now living in Buenos Aires as a single dad. Enjoy the ride - its short - live your dream - steer your ship or it will be steered for you.
> This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful.
The idea of a safety net is a silly idea. The whole world had very little safety net just 100 years ago, and we still managed fine to make progress and to get out of poverty (on average).
On the contrary, when you know you have very little safety net, you tend to try harder and to persevere a lot more.
> The idea of electricity is a silly idea. The whole world had very little electricity just 100 years ago. and we still managed fine to make progress
This is just an argument from tradition and not even a good one. It's debatable (and maybe impossible to prove) if it's even true. 100 years ago, the global economy fell into a huge decline that led to more global safety nets. Then, were there even less safety nets 50 years ago? And did that lack of existence not hinder progress?
> you tend to try harder
Is there any actual evidence for this? If I don't have a social net, I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to try harder at my risky, innovative product. I'm going to give up and do something 'safe' that only marginally increases economic output.
This is definitely not true. How many people for instance can go into journalism and do unpaid internships without family support?
The entire idea of most entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in tech is a myth. Out of all of major tech companies now, how many of the founders came from disadvantaged backgrounds?
Safety net and resources correlates heavily in almost all aspects of your life, having a better life helps immensely in any project you do in your life, including entrepreneurship
> A safety net and family resources correlate with nothing related to entrepeneurship and risk taking
You might be on to something, just look at the examples here. Being successful in tech and a well-known risk taker seems strongly related to having a 4-5 letter last name. Bezos, Brin, Dell, Gates, Page, Jobs, Musk, Thiel...Zuckerberg, okay an outlier, but everyone just says Zuck -- so tossup?/s
The “one that works out” can also give you a misrepresentation of how the world works and a false sense of how lucky one should expect to be over a long period of time.
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
I have thrown away (in hindsight) amazing lottery tickets a hilarious number of times. Despite that poor track record, I have been able to grind out an enviable life sans lottery ticket. Showing up and being hungry is a huge part of the game. I’ve also had to reboot my career relatively late, which isn’t a place you want to be but it isn’t a death sentence if you don’t want it to be.
While there is an element of survivor bias to my story, people always underestimate the role of stamina and willingness to grind when no one else would. It is a very long game but so is life. I was never looking for the easiest way, and in hindsight I think that produced more satisfying results even if the path had much lower lows.
Well with the style of tech interviews we have, luck is definitely involved. Some questions are simply my style (I like graphs and dynamic programming for example), and I’m lucky if the interviewer happens to choose these. But I don’t like for example two pointers problems.
And also I’ve long ago dissociated my tech interview performance with my actual performance indicated by performance reviews.
Corollary: Choosing _not_ to do something is as much an action as choosing _to_ do something. Which shines a bright light on the meaninglessness of the phrase “the only actions regretted are those not taken”.
There's also the option of choosing to not commit to either action. One stays in the status quo without choosing it, but since agency is negatively correlated with regret and no agency was used, the 'choosing not to do something' option probably has a higher chance of being regretted.
Lol same. Left a great tech company where was doing well to pursue the startup life. "If I work hard, I will make it". Startup failed, and the same prior opportunity hasn't come around. Such is life.
A lot of people experienced that during the 2020 boom. The lucky break wasn't a lucky break it was just a huge hiring boom. Once that's over the status quo returns.
There was a time 10-15 years ago when there was a lot of discussion (including here on hn) on whether it's best to stay at a fang job or join a startup. It was basically a choice between making millions at a steady but intellectually unrewarding job or risking it all at a fun startup.
> It’s allowed because it just runs locally like any overlay and doesn’t interact with their systems.
This is account is spamming - as in advertising on HN. This software is definitely not "allowed" during any typical leetcode interview. The website is very explicit and upfront about this being cheating.
They're also posting during the middle of the day in the country where the company making this product is headquartered, and it's 4AM in the country where the vast majority of HN users are.
It contains multiple instances of classic ChatGPT phrasing, em-dashes, smart quotes, things that you simply never saw before 2020, etc. One of these in isolation and yeah okay it's an unfounded accusation, but I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
> em-dashes…things that you simply never saw before 2020
I’m sorry but this is patently false. Apple devices have been autocorrecting two hyphens into a em dash since as long as I can remember and I personally used them all the time before LLMs were a thing and absolutely saw them online. I try not to use them now because people will annoyingly call me out for using ChatGPT when I’m not.
I think Apple devices also default to “smart quotes” if I understand what you mean by that. For example I’m typing this on my iPhone and I get this quote character automatically when I tap the double quote button on the default keyboard: “
If I want straight quotes I have to long press the quote button and explicitly select it: "
I think on macOS it’s the opposite for quotes, but macOS will absolutely autocorrect double hyphens to em dashes.
> I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
There’s a also a big difference between using AI to reformat/clean up your text, especially for non-native English speakers and a bot just spamming LLM replies, but none of your “gotchas” can discern the difference…
I didn't say em-dashes were never seen before 2020. Re-read the sentence. It's a list - "em-dashes" and "things that you simply never saw before 2020" are two items in that list. But even assuming I meant em-dashes, it's interesting to compare how frequent they were a few years ago versus now. Take the most upvoted HN submission (8 years ago):
There is on instance, an obvious copy-paste. Now go to any from the current top list. I count 10+ per submission, even on submissions with much lower post counts that the Stephen Hawking one.
But I'm not going around policing em-dashes or smart quotes and calling people out for using them. It's more like when someone gets a bingo in ChatGPT phrasing and style idiosyncrasies then it becomes suspicious and I'd hate to think I'm here talking to bots (I've already left many subreddits because for AI slop).
I've seen highly rated posts on HN that might as well have started with "You're absolutely right!"
>I think it would suit you to do the same, now that you’ve acknowledged it.
I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid. It's clearly AI and I would bet my life on that post having been at least edited by ChatGPT.
>What did you hope to achieve with the accusation?
Plenty of online spaces are now full of bots posting and replying to other bots with the occasional human engagement. Some subreddits I used to post on are practically useless now with all the AI spam. Dead internet theory etc. If I wanted to talk to a bot I would use AI directly without pretending I'm discussing something with humans.
> I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid
You literally wrote “yeah okay it’s an unfounded accusation”.
I hope you can see why I thought that was an acknowledgement?
Sure I don’t want bots any more than you do, but I also don’t think it changes anything to blindly accuse anyone you think sounds like an LLM.. I mean, bots don’t self-destruct if you call them out or anything.
Engaging with bots likely just amplifies the problem (by causing them to respond), rather than just downvoting their posts.
To land at the the author's difficulty level, you need to not have chronic life-shifting catastrophes. That is, the sort of challenges that slot your life in a place where the long reaches are to keep housing and hopefully have food for the kids.
I started out where the author was. Well, roughly. +Kids, -Secondary edu. I could and did rise above that. And above 3 economy shifts that each reset my biz to zero.
I did not rise above my spouse being swapped for an adult with profound psych issues. I took on the single dad and caregiver roles well enough.
However, I could not overcome the daily sabotage of, well, everything. It's like a TV trope where you are shackled to your worst enemy. But you have to keep them safe and your loved ones safe from them.
It's tough to maintain a job schedule when the police frequently call you during the workday (w and w/o CPS). Or when your transpo is stolen and can't be replaced.
In short, it's particular tough to pretend to be stable. Eventually there are no bridges left to burn.
Seeing the other comments I feel like the luckiest moment of my life was meeting my future wife when I was at school with 16 and having been together since for 20+ years, through higher education and kids and house mortgage and all. Zero drama, mutual respect and affection, both still preserving some independence to maintain a „self“, good double income.
Might sound stupid, but this major life area being just a rock solid fundament frees up so much energy my peers still struggle with nowadays quite often it’s insane in hindsight. Everyday life costs are lower, some risk taking is possible when someone has your back unconditionally and even supports it (as long as not going reckless), and a secure home base to return to is something I guess even money can’t easily buy. Short of being born already rich I guess that’s a cheat code with similar small odds, and I appreciate it.
Then the „business opportunities“ become just something way more relaxed. Not identity level validation attempts or despair to get into a better life. Which again allows better judgement calls and reintroduces more fun and creativity into many things.
Unfortunately, the "one" which accepts you, is no guarantee of it being the one which "works out" (in the short or long term). My experience is now 4x "found one that ultimately doesn't work out" (each lasting 2 to 3 years).
I'm now taking time out to try to figure out how to escape the confines of the career path I've taken to find something different.
Open to suggestions of entirely different careers that I could switch to that might have higher odds of not being toxic rat-races full of people telling lies and bullshit just to survive.
But broader experience suggests the world of work just sucks these days (and yes, it's these days - our parent's generation had a brief period of doing 9-to-5 jobs which paid well enough to afford homes, have families and social lives and holidays. We don't get that now.). No wonder large numbers of my generation are dropping out of the workforce...
Maybe move to a different country with a better work culture? I don't know where you are from, I'm from Belgium and the only truly toxic corporate places I've seen here were the ones managed by Americans.
I think any huge tech company or private equity owned company will be a rat race. There are plenty of tech jobs that don’t fall under that umbrella. They might not pay as well, but they’re out there!
I personally got one of those jobs at a smaller, "non-tech" (read: engineering) company, quite close to where I grew up. Got to pick my language and tools, have ownership of my slice of the product, live a very comfortable and flexible 9-to-5 where they gave me the room to do my best work. Pays maybe half of the typical inflated tech salary. But I'm doing well for myself.
My only issues at this point are 1) my life has bucket list things to check off that have nothing to do with work, 2) I'm running out of super interesting things to work on and entering a sort of maintenance mode on my program, 3) the old guard, who were all retirement age, are checking out for a new generation, with a new direction.
So all that being said, I've been looking for work far afield in places closer to my bucket list items. Hopefully, I can find another smaller, specialized company that needs a programmer with my skillset, because this experience has been fantastic.
I’m in data analytics for government. It’s got a ton of meaning, tons of ceiling for skill and talent, and very dedicated kind colleagues. No rat race except who can help people the most, not a legit title haha, but there are 2X analysts that inspire me. We also need DBA and tech team to power up our systems :)
I work for a small local company. There's ten people, basically all working some kind of part time. The work is interesting, the pay is peanuts, the atmosphere is great. Thank god it's Monday tomorrow!
We job hop, have multiple hustles. Many people on this board have started multiple companies, sometimes at once, on an ongoing basis. Do you only want just one friend? People tend to have multiple romantic/sexual entanglements, sometimes at once, but generally more than one over a lifetime.
I think this can be a useful maxim to get you to the next day, but in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life. We grow and change and need novelty. We are held in a web of interdependent, ever-shifting relationships - with people, businesses, material goods, ecology. I think that generally people are seeking connection in a broader sphere. To be held in community, to have multiple significant identities (mother/wife/boss), to live in richness and abundance where any one thing is not make or break.
> in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life
We seem to view "reality" through different lenses. I've usually found "one" to be a magic number; as long as it's the "right one." That's the gist of what he's saying.
In my experience, needing more than one, often signals issues that need closer examination.
In my community, we have a joke: "An addict is someone that needs two One-A-Days."
I find the same, individual jobs or relationships seem to give supralinear returns.
There's a lot of initial investment and groundworks, then once you're well-integrated, the marginal returns get higher for the most established relationships.
We can try to walk in 10-20 directions at the same time and move a tiny direction all, or none.
Or we can realize we have some things to learn that we will learn no matter whether we pick the startup, or job to learn transferrable skills and also become better well rounded.
Do you really think that is what the author meant? They're not saying "you only need 1". They're talking about going from 0 to 1. It's sometimes a long and arduous 0. Your framing doesn't help someone trying to get from 0 to 1. Once they're at 1 though, sure. But getting there can feel helpless, and that's what this post is about.
The trouble is how many times can you try. I tired building 6 businesses; all failed. I just don't have the resources to try again. I've lost too much. I am lucky to have been able to try at all. Like that parable floating around about the people and the carnival games, the rich own the game, the poor run the games and the middle class get a chance or two to play.
What do you do if the job that makes you an offer doesn't excite you? What if the house that feels like home needs more repairs than you can afford? What if the program that accepts you has crappy funding? What if the person who chooses you has red flags?
Do you say "screw it," cross your fingers, and walk through the door that kind of sucks? Or do you keep looking as long as your resources last you?
Maybe consider that we are all calibrated to standards that are this hodgepodge of other people’s messaging of what standards should be, and they communicate them for a variety of reasons, very few of which are truly designed for your reality, your situation.
So when you say, ‘kinda sucks’, perhaps ask if the opinion is grounded in (your) reality?
Once recalibrated to accept that what we are in, is inescapable true life, then we stop looking for something better, and instead focus on the challenge of making it better than it should naturally be.
Happiness I believe, is a decision, we choose it when we feel it’s a sustainable perspective. I think it’s sustainable to allow ourselves to be happy, whenever we achieve marginal improvement on what is natural.
Every situation is different, and none of us can reliably predict the future. Sometimes dealing with a bad job until you get a better one is the right move. Sometimes it's the wrong move.
Specifics, about the job and yourself, matter. If you feel like sharing, this is a pretty good community with good instincts.
The magic in "all it takes is for one to work out" is in the strength it gives you to keep trying. Trying something that might fail is hard, even when we know that trying is the right thing to do.
There is no certainty, not about the future at least. In my experience, being able to face uncertainty without despair is one of the most important skills to have.
The interesting thing about "all it takes is for one to work out" is that it helps you face uncertainty. No matter how many times you've tried, you maintain the faith that the next time might succeed.
And it is all about faith, which is probably why it is so hard for us analytic/logic-driven people to adopt. But the opposite of faith isn't knowledge--it's nihilism. If the universe is an uncaring and even hostile place, and if there are no guarantees that everything will work out, and if the only certainty is eventual death, then why even bother, right? Nihilism is seductive because it is the philosophy most compatible with reality. It is what you're left with after entering the Total Perspective Vortex.
The only antidote to nihilism is belief. Belief that things will work out. That it's worth fighting for things, even if we often lose. That striving to be the person we want to be is worth something.
I know I've drifted far from your original point about how to deal with compromise. Again, I feel the answer depends on the circumstances. But I think a general answer is to decide what "the right one" means for you and nurture the belief that you will get there eventually. Once you know where you want to be and have the conviction that you will get there, everything else is simple.
Simple, but not easy. Maybe you've compromised for your current job. What will it take to get "the right one"? Is it more skills? Is it connections? Is it money? Is it courage? Maybe you don't know--that's okay. What's the next job that will get you closer to your goal? What do you need to get that job?
I guarantee that one of the things you need to do is simply try. Try to apply for a new job; try to learn a new skill; try to make a new professional connection.
That's when you remember "all it takes is for one to work out". Try and fail and try again.
Often the "one" you need isn't the ideal, it's just what gets you into the market. I'm thinking a job that gets you some experience and much needed pay or a property that lets you build equity while prices continue to climb.
These are not final decisions, get something going is better than nothing. You don't need to be locked on a job, or a house, or a degree. People have more time in their life than they seem to think. Sure, you might spend a few years on something not ideal, but the alternative being nothing is much worse
Right. All it takes is for one to work out, if you have several suitable options. If some of the options are only vaguely suitable, or it comes to light through the process that some of them are not suitable at all, then it takes more than just one working out. That's what I was thinking while reading this.
“All it takes is for one to work out.” is not the same as "You just need the one [job] that’s the right fit." or "You just need the one [house] that feels like home." or "You just need the one [life partner]."
Author's examples are, spiritually, the opposite of their friend's advice - in fact, "all it takes is for one to work out" is something often said to people who lost hope because they got lost being too picky.
Simplifications always leave something out. It's like the three body problem: people think one factor matters most, and one other factor controls it. But once they realize there is a third factor that alters one or the first two, or mediates between them, it gets more complicated.
A writers perspective: I like to pause from time to time and thank my talent and my education for training me to the point I can trully enjoy difficult classical work. And read it again and again when I miss it. Also being able to sit and write for hours is pretty incredible on its own.
Yes I have nothing to show for it. No money, no deals, no awards... And that upsets me 70% percent of the time. In a healthy way, where it just keeps me going back to the desk same time every day.
Rest of the time I really enjoy just being able to do it and being able to afford the time to do it. As one of the few in my family with degree and withouth second job.
I strongly disagree with the author. The mindset they described somewhat reminds me of body positivity—excess weight is not good for your health, accepting it through a mental shift is a bad advice.
Here is my personal advice to whoever reads this comment. Ignore everything they say on the internet. Do what works best for you. Trust your intuition. Set bold goals. Always learn and strive to become better in everything you do.
If you failed an interview, it’s perfectly ok to be disappointed. Spend a day calling your own self names. It’s normal! The very next day analyze why you failed, see where you need to improve. Rinse and repeat. This will get you whatever the hell you want in this life.
I agree about body positivity, but the big difference is we are talking about relationships here. Whenever it's a relationship, whether it's professional, platonic or romantic, sometimes it really is just them. But more often than not it's a bit of both, it's up to you to decide whether you want to make it about them or make it about you. If it's always about them then you'll be that person who only ever meets assholes. We all know the truth: you're the asshole.
So yes, reflect and think about what you could do better, but don't compromise on your principles or try to be a person you're not.
I think you missed the point, he doesn't disagree with your points at all, he's just pointing out that you shouldn't stress yourself out thinking you have to win them all when actually 1 is often all you need.
I’m not sure if the author’s perspective aligns with what I said.
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
I don’t think anyone expects to pass all the interviews. Seriously, who expects that? The right fit of choices is often limited. You need to deeply understand your weaknesses and strengths to even know what the right fit is. People are usually unaware of their own superpowers. Hard work is the only thing that pays off. Luck comes to those who are prepared.
The article has no connection to body positivity at all. It’s about storming through a long series of rejections or failures. And your entire second paragraph could very well be a justification for body positivity itself.
"[O]ne outlier can dominate the average"; "We're used to living in this world of normal distributions and you act a certain way, but as soon as you switch to this realm that is governed by a power law, you need to start acting vastly different. It really pays to know what kind of world or what kind of game you are playing."
Each "no" is a signal that you're still trying which puts you above many people whose ego can't handle hearing that word so they settle and turn to bitterness.
A corollary to this, for me at least, has always been: don’t try to fake your way into an opportunity. Be yourself, let people pass on the real you if they want, because you don’t want to land a job where you can’t thrive as yourself. Obviously there’s great privilege in that and sometimes you need to eat shit in order to eat at all, but if you have the option I hope you’re able to wait for the right fit.
On the one hand it is a wholesome article. On the other hand - so much wasted potential of people squeezing out the last bits when competing. Nash equilibria can suck
Why are so many people in this thread purposefully misinterpreting the post so they can criticize it? The author obviously doesn't mean you only need one thing per domain to work out in your lifetime, but the present. I.e you don't need two girlfriends at once, even though you might have multiple relationships throughout your life...
I think author's use of the word "the" is misleading:
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit. [emphasis mine]
You don't need the job that's the right fit. There's more than one. You need any job that fits. (Or that you can make fit you.)
So, if you want to size up the search, let p be the probability that a typical job you apply for will (1) result in you being hired and (2) be a job that fits you. Then the expected number of jobs you must apply to before getting hired to a job that fits you is 1/p. [1]
Say you think p = 5%. Then, on average, you'll need to apply to 20 jobs to land one that fits you.
How many jobs do you need to apply to have a 90% chance of landing one that fits you? If q is the wanted probablity of overall success, then the number of jobs k you must apply to is given by k = log(1 − q) / log(1 − p). So, in this example, k = log(1 − 0.9) / log(1 − 0.05) ≈ 45 applications.
That's a lot of rejections and ill-fitting jobs before landing one that sticks. Which is why it's useful to be persistent and flexible. Being able to make a job fit can dramatically reduce your search.
It's also interesting to consider that we are such adaptative creatures that we will likely settle to a similar level of happiness no matter what the choice.
If you try 2N times to succeed in ventures which each have a 1/N chance of success, as N increases the probability of such as success quickly converges on about 86.5%.
(The limit is 1-e^(-2).)
So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
> So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
But that perfectly highlights why the "startup gamble" is a great bet for VCs but a horrible bet for most employees. Let's say N is, generously, 50 (i.e. 1 in 50 startups are a resounding success, which seems probably a bit over-optimistic but reasonable). VCs can easily spread investment around to 100 startups, but employees get a few swings at bat at most when it comes to where they work.
For most things in life, you often just don't have that many chances. E.g. most people don't date a hundred people before finding their spouse.
I agree with his sentiments and his examples. But my fear is that on a place like Hacker News, people might not understand the difference between his advice and trying to have a successful startup.
>You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
When I’m applying for a job, I can apply for multiple jobs at once and interview for multiple jobs over a a few weeks. It’s especially easy when I am both interviewing and working remotely. I don’t have to make excuses to leave work during the middle of the day or worse case fly out for an interview.
The same is true for buying a home, I can put bids in for multiple homes - or in my case just have my homes built in 2003 and 2016. I know the world is different now.
>You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
This is one place where of course you can shoot your shot at multiple potential partners and date often. What you don’t want to do is try marriage multiple times if it can be avoided. A bad marriage will wreck every part of your life and a divorce will set you back financially. (Happily remarried for 15 years after a horrible first marriage.)
None of his examples are applicable to starting a business. 9/10 startups fail and even out of those that “succeed” only a small number of those have an outsized return for the founder where they wouldn’t be better off financially working a regular old enterprise dev job for those years let alone getting a job at BigTech.
VCs can make multiple bets at one time and be more assured that they capture the 1/10 startups that succeed than a founder.
There is a huge difference between being able to take multiple chances at once in all of those scenarios and being stuck with the 1/10 choices you make for multiple years.
No it's not. Gambler's fallacy is "I just flipped tails so heads is more likely now". I read this article as "heads has a 50% chance of coming up so I'll get one eventually" (which is true - law of large numbers).
I think none of those blanket statements here work.
Really it's just odds of finding success vs effort / time spent. And whether that's worth it.
Any of the blanket statements could be true depending on what the exact odds are.
There could be near 0% chance of finding success and it would be better idea to rethink and spend time elsewhere, or yes, there's 10% chance of finding success and it's significant enough that trying 20 times is enough.
If we are talking about e.g. finding a house, if you are not finding any it could very well be that your expectations vs budget is unlikely to find anything and you have to reconsider strategy.
Someone could be repeatedly trying to find work, and thinking it's just a matter of time, but really time would be better spent on improving their strategy, resume, or other means.
These statements to me seem like motivational non-sense which misrepresent how real world works or what the patterns really are like. At best they just give someone a false understanding of how the world works, at worst they make someone spend all their time in the wrong direction.
You lost something when every other person started doing the same thing. Now you have to write or review ten applications instead of one. Now you're going to get paid less because it cost $20k to hire you instead of $2k. Now your company is going to be filled with like-minded people, "hustlers", who do not know how to improve things themselves, just spray and pray until someone mistakenly rewards them.
The way I read this is that there are many "games" in life (applying for schools, jobs, dating, etc) where the odds of "winning" each instance are not in your favor, but you only need to win once to win overall. If you treat every absence of a positive outcome as a failure, then you're inevitably going to lose hope and give up.
This is in contrast to gambling where you actually do need to win more often than not to win overall.
Seems like a momumental waste of energy being pushed as "hustling". Applying to college should be cooperative between you and the admissions office: asking, are we a good fit? Applying in the hope they mess up and admit you when they're really better off rejecting you is so antisocial.
Admissions are sort-of Pareto distributed, so most people admitted were on the edge of being rejected. Since there is a bit of noise in the process, this is why any one individual applying to 10x as many places of a similar tier will be more likely to get into one. But then when everyone does it, no one is more or less likely to get in except those that are actually cooperating with the admissions office. You're burning down the commons for a fleeting bit of warmth. Might I suggest installing a furnace in your house instead?
All I can say is that the method works specifically because people like you exist. It kind of defeats the purpose if we try to change your mind about this.
Lol, yes. If you're a selfish egoist, you probably don't want to convert others to your philosophy.
I think it's possible to punish people who are taking these selfish actions, and I think universities should. Maybe they should make a secret database where they list the people who applied to their university, and subtract off points for every other university they applied to. Or, recruiting agencies can mark down candidates for every other job they are applying to. I don't think they do, and this isn't the startup I want to make or area I want to devote my life to, it just sucks that people are being rewarded for playing negative-sum games.
> Applying in the hope they mess up and admit you when they're really better off rejecting you is so antisocial.
What? That's not what I'm suggesting at all. I just found the post to be a helpful reminder of how to have a healthy mindset towards some uncertainties in life, but it seems like you took away something completely different.
What do you mean by "a healthy mindset"? It isn't healthy for society. It isn't healthy in the world where everyone has this mindset. It isn't healthy to treat your life as a lottery, hoping for a winning ticket instead of creating that ticket yourself. The fact that you consider applications to be uncertainties in life is very telling. You can make them much less uncertain, if you stop thinking of them like a lottery and start doing the things that prove you are valuable to others.
Did you know that USAMO qualifiers have >50% rate of admission to MIT? IMO gold medalists have >80% acceptance rate, and it's only so low because international admissions is limited to 10% of the student body. Life is only a lottery if you have an unhealthy mindset holding you back from improving yourself. Just because university admissions involve a lot of luck at the bottom does not mean you have to limit yourself to a bottom feeder spraying and praying to get in.
Again, I think you've completely misinterpreted the post as well as what I'm trying to say. A "healthy mindset" is simply one that gives you a framework to navigate the world without falling into despair when things don't go your way. Learning to accept that things won't always go your way, and that in some cases they might not go your way the majority of the time, but that they don't have to, is one component of that.
I'm not making any recommendations on how people should actually go about finding wealth, or success, or happiness, or whatever it is you're looking for in life; only how to deal with it when they don't get those things immediately.
Again, I think you don't understand: your "healthy mindset" here is a vice. I do not think it is healthy to drink away your woes. I also do not think it is healthy to cope by treating your life like a big lottery. As I have said several times, the reason I do not consider it healthy is it does not actually help you get what you want, and statistically will leave most people worse off. Finally, from a societal perspective, just like drunk driving hurts everyone around you, this coping behavior also hurts everyone around you.
I would be okay with people spreading beliefs that only hold themselves back, especially if it made them happier. However, I draw the line when they endorse antisocial behavior. I've personally been negatively effected by these hustlers' acions. Almost everyone has, whether or not they can articulate why it seems impossible to get interviewed for a job these days.
I'm not at all advocating for treating life like a lottery. I've had overall a successful career due in large part to my own effort, but the best opportunities have come to me simply by being in the right place at the right time, so it would be arrogant to discount luck entirely. I've also had periods of repeated failure, and if I had counted each and every one of those as a score against my own value then I wouldn't have made it this far. Put more simply, the healthy mindset I have is to do what you can, and accept what you can't. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. Easier said than done.
It seems like you're misinterpreting my words through the lens of your own frustrations right now, so I don't think there's anything else I can say to help you. I just hope you find what you're looking for eventually.
You are not even talking about the article at this point. "All it takes is for one to work out" is TFT. You are instead saying, "be stoic in the things you cannot effect." The latter is much more defensible, and something I endorse. But if you hold the latter, then all it takes is for none to work out. You would accept none, even if you would prefer one, two, or ten. Your comment is a classic motte-and-bailey defense.
Interestingly I found my first job through a video game and I never went to uni. I got good at the game (to brag, top 0.1%) and met people in the game who referred me because of the "respect" from being good at that particular game got me. Might seem odd, but a lot of people in the industry played this game and ability to be good at the game did signal something.
I have never spam applied anywhere, and have hyperfocused on very specific positions, putting a lot of prep effort into what I have considered strong matches.
Indeed. "Just one more roll of the dice and I'll be ahead."
Worse, this guy isn't trying to get a job. He's just trying to get into grad school. Which is no longer a guarantee of a good career, but may be a guarantee of a big debt. Remember that "I did everything right" post on HN a few weeks ago? CS degree from a good school, but nobody wants junior CS people any more.
Taking a break from studying for my interview in two days at a FANG company, I checked Hacker News and this article was at the top. I've been studying for this interview harder than any of the others in the past. I feel well-prepared, but there's always the luck factor. I hope this is a sign that this interview will be the one to work out!
This is beautifully put. I’ve heard it in a different context which was equally profound for me. While searching for the perfect home, after seeing a few, my realtor quipped something to the effect of “there is more than one perfect home for you out there”. I took that to mean that if I have a bunch of choices and they all feel right, then I can go with anyone and be content with the decision. I can tell myself it was the right call at the time.
Why I like the authors interpretation even more is because when the chips are down, you just need the thing to work once (in many contexts) and that might be your golden ticket. Like the one VC that meets you out of a 100, or any of the examples the author wrote.
This is a great approach! After every opportunity that closed on me another arose, and it always was the better one.
Through these experiences I totally agree, and try to apply it to life, but it's hard, even knowing that it's true. How cool is it for every college, person, job offer, scholarship to want you?
Even though we're looking just for "the one" it's very hard for me to mitigate the feeling of getting rejected, even knowing it was not "the one". Rejection generally hurts, when you care about the goal
Wow, I really dislike this framing of life as a lottery. Yes, people can get lucky. You could win the lottery. Statistically, someone else will hold the winning ticket, every time. It's even worse, because graduate school admissions and startup success are correlated between attempts. If you bring a shotgun but you're not even aiming at the target, you're never going to hit it.
Exactly correct. As a YouTuber, all it takes is one YouTube Short to go viral for me, and I'll have hundreds of thousands of subscribers overnight. I haven't had anything go seriously viral, but my biggest Shorts have resulted in huge subscriber jumps. The best advice I ever received was to consistently post for years on end. If you have high-quality content, one of those Shorts is almost certain to eventually hit the big leagues.
When it does, your life will change in an instant.
I thought HN is supposed to upvote articles that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Does this article gratify intellectual curiosity? I don't understand why these shallow feel-good articles devoid of any intellectual curiosity always get upvoted to the top! There are so many high effort, substantive articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest that nobody upvotes!
because even when it isn't why people come here, and if there was too much of it you may be right - a message which brings up a smile or warm feeling is enough for people to be thankfull
Obviously the article is voted to the top. So the the lurkers at /newest and the general HN audience must like this. Still I wish though that upvoters stuck to the HN guidelines of upvoting stuff that really gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, not just some feel-good piece. There is no shortage of other places where I can find feel-good articles. I want HN to stick to HN guidelines.
This is all the more sad for me because among all the spam, many high effort articles get posted to /newest but many don't get the upvotes. These shallow, feel-good articles always get the upvotes. I guess it takes more time to read and appreciate a high effort article. So I understand why this happens. But ...
The blog post is simple but it was enough of a good prompt to spark an interesting discussion. Sometimes the comments expand the depth of an idea and that's where the meat of curiosity thrives.
I submit articles personally that I think will start interesting conversations. I didn’t submit this one. But I suspected it would go in the direction of trying to start a company - which it did. That is entirely on brand for a site run by a VC company.
How many great opportunities are passed up by people waiting for the 'perfect' one to come along?
Job offers passed on because it wasn't the perfect fit. Marriage chances missed because the perfect soul mate must still be around the corner. Good schools rejected because it wasn't their dream school.
Luck often accompanies those willing to accept less than perfect in many cases.
On a much less optimistic dark humor note, this is the same argument in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies about a superintelligent AI emerging and being a threat to humans.
I’ve considered some form of grad school a few times, but I always came to the conclusion there just wasn’t enough value in it for a software engineer like me. I don’t plan on teaching, and I’m not really interested in the “science” of computer science so much as the practice of it. Anyone able to validate or challenge my assumptions here?
If you don't want to do any of the science part of computer science then this route may not be one for you to consider. However, if we assume that AI is going to be with us in 5 years, and that it would take you 5 years to get a PhD in an AI-related area you do find interesting, and furthermore that demand for talent with a PhD in that area has gone up, or stayed constant vs demand for general software development talent, then, based on that pile of "if"s, while a $100 million job offer from Meta may not exist in 5 years, it is still something to consider.
The only thing to add here is the value of the network you will build. It’s very easy for swes to forget that people connecting to people is how things happen. Just be careful around cost. Speaking from experience, having student loan debt changes the range of your vision.
While it’s true that all we need is one to work out, in general we strive to be in positions where we have multiple options, not just hinging everything on one passing chance. Life is less stressful that way, and that’s why people today feel like they are under so much pressure and have little choice over how their lives unfold.
Purely poetic advice. If the local economy collapses, you will very much want to move. There's still a 50% chance the first spouse doesn't hold up until death. There are many schools that give out degrees that aren't worth a wooden frame in today's job market.
Needed to read this. 20 years building software for other people, finally launched my own thing a few weeks ago. Most days feel like nothing is working. But you only need one thing to click.
Personally, I do believe and still on the perpetual aim for that “You have to be right just once.” For me, it is not about the “right one(s).” My philosophy is that I should be able to “Walk Out” from situations, deals, and options that I picked and be ready for the next.
I wrote about Walking Out,[1] but more from a content/digital life perspective. I do follow similar thinking with life situations too.
I’m neither complaining nor comparing, but hey, life dealt a bad enough hand early on. Mother left us when the last of our siblings (sister) was barely 6 months old, and father was never present. My brothers and I survived by working odd jobs, stealing vegetables from neighbors, and running errands for almost everyone in the neighborhood. My brother worked repairing bicycles, cleaning trucks, and giving up studies so I could study. I started teaching the neighbors’ kids in my 5th grade and paid through school, then worked computer stuff to pay for college, and also begged a lot of relatives to supplement for food, books, etc. I know what actual starvation meant. It was only around my 15th year I learnt that winters can actually be warm when I had a sleep-over at my friend’s place where they had warm blankets that was thick enough.
So, my belief is that things won’t work out. Can I Walk Out? Well, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
Way later in life, I realized the neighbors knew about our night crawls. That was why they started giving us their vegetable garden harvest, and the “we have some extra cooking oil.”
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
You mean, the first one to say yes. Tbh seems more like first to say yes, not first to be fit and say yes.
> You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home.
Same here. Is easy to find one to say yes. Hard to be “feels like home” && say yes.
> You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
“The one” is hard.
>You don’t need ten universities to say yes. You just need the one that opens the right door.
Same. What even means “the right door”? How can you even know before you got in?
I think it’s a bad analogy. At least frame it a more realistic: your only need one job to say yes. Might not be the right job but it’s a job. Same for all other.
Was living in a small city for a while during the pandemic. Commented to parent that dating scene wasn’t going to be good and I needed to move to a bigger city. They answered “all you need is to meet one person”.
I did. Met on an app, turned out they lived round the corner from me, we are now married. She is a _very_ unusual person (has to be to work with me) and you wouldn’t expect her to be in a small city, but due to particular life circumstances she had just moved there temporarily.
The problem is that the opportunity you need might be a 1 in 100 lifetimes opportunity...
These days once in a lifetime opportunities are getting increasingly rare... This is something that the lucky few do not understand because they may pass up on once-in-100-lifetimes opportunities just about every single day. The asymmetry of opportunities is massive.
Our system is not a level playing field.
No system in the history of humanity has wasted as much human potential as our current system. Opportunities are completely monopolized.
I'm confused. This just seems like feel-good bullshit advice that only works for people in extremely good circumstances.
There's a false equivalence between -
“All it takes is for one to work out.”
and the following:
- "You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit."
- "You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home. "
The latter assumes that _every_ attempt you make has a chance at being "the right fit", "the one that feels like home". That is not the way things works for 99% of us.
Just try to enjoy your life. "The one" is a mindset of seeking for a "release". Frankly, this does not sound healthy and I guess there are bigger underlying problems.
I think it would be better if it were about exercising; it's more useful advise that way.
So, all it takes is for you to work out: You may not get into that grad school / that job, but you'll be healthier and you'll feel less depressed. In fact, even if you're in grad school, it's pretty good advice for coping avoiding burnout, coping with impostor syndrome etc.
That may be true, but it's also a trap: You can say exactly the same thing to someone at a casino with their last £50 at five in the morning. Sometimes, the advice that people give you, if they care about you, is that the smart thing to do is to walk away from a rough game - and if you don't, the end can be very bad indeed. You are a variable over the search space, and the way that you interact with it alters the results that you will get as applied to your life:
Making this specific, I used to work in employment advice. As one of the things here is a job search, I'll touch on that one: There are people who have been applying for jobs for decades. I've met many people who haven't been able to get a job in north of twenty years. It's obvious that what they're doing will never work out for them. There may be one job in the world out there that will take them, but just doing a naive search will - in all probability - never locate for them that job. The world is too large and they don't have the time to search even a single percentage of it. What they need to do is to look at all the reasons they're not getting a job and prioritise addressing those:
- Do they have all the qualifications and certificates they need for their target industry?
- Do they have recent relevant experience?
- Do they have a good CV?
- Do they have a decent cover letter?
- Do they have a good interview?
Now, that's not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.
The other way in which it's a bad piece of advice is that people aren't machines. When you've spent a great deal of time gambling and losing then the tendency is for people to seek bigger payoffs at higher comparative risks and/or lower comparative chances of success. The tendency is for people to be less likely to do the things, e.g. volunteering, that will improve their odds as their tally of losses increases.
People lose time in making the attempts, they lose energy (which is perhaps more important than time,) and they lose sight of other options - which game they're playing, why they're playing it, how they're playing it. It will, in all probability, not work out within their lifetimes - and the reason that it won't work out is that following this sort of strategy has made them the sort of person for whom it is unlikely to do so. Whilst their friends went and volunteered, and took concrete steps, they just kept trying that same strategy on the assumption that at least one was out there for them that met their requirements. And there just wasn't. Not in that timespan.
Now, I'm not saying just give up and never try. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. But if you've been trying to make something work out - as a rule of thumb - for six months say, and you're not seeing concrete steps towards success - you should re-examine your fundamental assumptions. Preferably, if it's something high-stakes, with the assistance of a competent third party that you trust. Because maybe you're the problem, and maybe there's something you can do about it. And you'd best find that out now rather than spending 20 years on some warmly meant advice that perhaps isn't going to work out for you.
I have been calling out specifically the difference between things you can try in parallel with little to know negative consequences - like applying for multiple jobs, going on multiple interviews, putting bids in for multiple houses - and winning one, and things that you have to do sequentially that cost time - like starting a business and failing multiple times that take 3-5 years each, cost real money and there are opportunity cost.
In the short run, I'd mostly agree with you. Something being parallelisable at a low cost lets you do more of it in a short space of time, and probably lends itself to what should be an earlier decision as to whether to reexamine your approach. You're going to have a lot more information earlier - all else being equal.
In the mid to long run, however, the costs mount up - however small they may start off as. You can make, say, 20 job applications a day - (not an uncommon thing to have people do if they were on mandated provision) - have a couple of hundred open in a few weeks and get nothing back. That takes something out of people. People will still spend time from finding and making those applications, energy, motivation, an awareness of the wider context in which their problem's structured....
There's a human component to the problem which generates opportunity costs for things that don't seem to have any. Like yes, technically, you can put 20 job applications in a day and then go and volunteer. But it's the rare person who's actually going to have the energy, motivation and awareness to do that when they're going hard on a broad search strategy.
From an investor perspective yeah if you put $200k into a 20 different business, 19 can fail but that one that gives you back 50x your investment is a massive payoff.
Of course this is of little solace to the 19 other "entrepeneurs" you funded, who wind up with zero for busting their butt for the gamble
This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful. Given enough chances you will make it, big. That means the #1 factor in success is the number of chances you get to fail and try again, not necessarily how inherently good you are. I try to remind myself of this often. I have been given so many chances, and I took them.
This always sounded intuitively correct to me, but looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net. They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Contrast this with some of the people I grew up who came from wealthy families: A lot of their parents pushed them toward entrepreneurship and funded their ventures, but to date I can only think of one business from this cluster of friends that went anywhere. When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this, other than to remind myself to keep pushing through the difficult times for things I really want even when I could fall back to an easy path and give up.
Who are you thinking of? Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk all came from wealthy families. They all had the safety net of their family wealth if their business didn’t work out. Even someone who had parents to pay their student loans is relatively privileged, not everyone starts their 20’s debt-free and able to take financial risks.
Bezos’ mom had him at 17, his biological father owned a bike shop, and his mother remarried when Bezos was 4 to a Cuban immigrant who came to the country at 16 and ended up working as a petroleum engineer.
They wound up middle class after all that, but I certainly wouldn’t say Bezos came from a “wealthy family”.
Bezos' parents lent him $250k to start Amazon. The point is that by the time Bezos started Amazon they were wealthy and could provide him this safety net. Not many middle class families would be able to loan their kid that much money.
That $250k was their life’s savings. They made a huge bet on their son.
His mom took night classes while raising him so she could finish her education while working to support a family.
okay but $250k is still $250k right? Most people in the world, for most parts of the world, don't see that kind of money in an entire lifetime of work. Most people think privilege means a trust fund, but a $250k loan of US dollars (life-savings or not) is also a privilege that most people don't have.
i think in this thread the goalposts were slowly moved. people were initially talking about success being predicted by having the excess necessary to comfortably take many shots on goal. it seems like we've granted that this $250k shot was a one-time thing.
it is true but irrelevant to the original topic that this is more money than the global poor ever see, and that this is more money that most people get to have. i don't think anyone was arguing that this represents zero privilege
Do you have a source for that being their life savings?
Most of your points have nothing to do with their wealth. Why would it suggest they’re poor if his mom had him at 17 and was taking night classes while raising him? She wasn’t employed, that just sounds like she herself was still able to take risks beyond her means probably because her father was wealthy.
Do you have a source for that not being their life savings? It sounds like you're just making assumptions and guesses as well; if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up. Perusing the "early life" section of Bezos' Wikipedia page doesn't suggest to me that he came from money, at least. But I don't see anyone on either side of the argument presenting anything beyond that.
> Do you have a source for that not being their life savings?
Do you have a source for the $250 not being from the invisible pink unicorn?
Because my understanding it was from the invisible pink unicorn
> Do you have a source for that not being their life savings?
I mean there are many sources that talk about the $300k he received from his family to start Amazon, it's a famous story. None of those sources mention that it was his family's life savings. I don't really know how to provide a source that says it wasn't his family's life savings, but I also can't provide a source that says he wasn't an alien from Zeta Reticula. This is generally the problem with proving a negative and why the onus is usually on the person making a positive assertion.
> if you're going to assert Bezos came from wealth in the first place, you have to back that up.
I did, I'm saying that a family that can give their son $300k to start a business in 1993 is wealthy. That would be about $674k today.
isn't this an argument against the original post: that the more dice rolls the greater likelihood of success?
Yep, my father, with no business training or college was funded by my grandfather and was in business for years, decades. He ultimately failed without any savings and died in poverty. Being a small business owner was the only job he ever had.
My grandfather was similar--he was the first one to leave the farm life and tried several different careers and businesses. He worked for a railroad, was a realtor, owned a lumber yard, and lastly owned a delicatessen. The lumber yard nearly destroyed the entire family because he would sell on credit and then contractors failed to pay up on time. It was a huge disaster and the the thing is, this was way before the Home Depot national type chains or the "84 Lumber" regional type chains and if he had had any business acumen at all, he could have been the franchise. People don't know what they don't know. Anyways, my dad worked for my grandfather for free for several years and screwed up his life quite a bit doing so in order to "save the family" and I think my dad has told me this damn story every single time I have called him on the telephone for at least the past 30 years. His complex over the whole situation must be enormous!
This is why I never started a business myself. I figured it was a family curse to fail at business.
Bezo’s maternal grandfather worked for the Department of Energy and owned a ranch in Texas. They were wealthy enough to have $300k to give to Jeff in 1993.
Those people you mention may be examples of the exception, not the rule. Certainly many new businesses work out when they are founded by someone from a wealthy family; it would be strange if that was never the case.
But maybe it's more common that successful businesses are started by founders coming from more modest means. Page & Brin, and Jobs & Wozniak come to mind (none came from poor families, but they weren't rich either). I'm sure there are many other examples, and those are just the famous ones; there are many successful companies started by people we've never heard of.
You really need to be connected and have resources to succeed or the machinery will eat you alive.
Yeah they aren't like, outlier wealthy though. They all had lawyer/doctor/banker parents.
If having your student loans paid off for you is enough, then there are 10s of millions of people in their shoes. Why did they not succeed if that is what it takes?
I didn’t say they need to be outlier wealthy, I’m disagreeing with the assertion that it just takes focus and grit to be successful. I agree with the initial comment that it has more to do with how many chances you get to take, and being able to take chances throughout your 20’s is a relatively rare and privileged opportunity. Most people need to find gainful employment immediately after college, they can’t take 5-10 years making no money on long shot bets.
Where are you getting the figure that there are 10’s of millions of college grads in their 20’s with no debt? There are only 2 million undergraduate grads in the US every year. I think you’re probably off by a couple orders of magnitude.
>> Why did they not succeed if that is what it takes?
short answer: it's might be necessary but not sufficient.
Alex Honnold, the rock climber with some pretty spectacular solo / speed ascents was asked why no-one else has free soloed El Cap, replied "it's hard." he spent a lot of time (years) building up to it and finishing other routes, and no one else has taken these first steps yet. He goes on that they may have the talent or disposition, but not the motivation or an experience that pushes them in another direction. His perspective (similar to general outlier success) is others will do it but it takes a bunch of things all coming together, including luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDTg4P9ZdP4
Contacts.
Bill Gates mother worked with IBM CEO. Without her maybe IBM would choose other company than Microsoft.
And Bill Gates father was in banking and was a millionaire
Was he in banking? For some reason I was under the impression he was a lawyer and partner in a major Seattle law firm.
And he had access to a computer terminal at his high school in 1968.
> Who are you thinking of?
It’s pretty clear that @Aurornis is talking about people they know personally. They literally mention that they’re talking about people they grew up with.
Whereas you are talking about a completely different group of people: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk are the survivorship bias set.
You’re talking at cross purposes with the person you’re responding to.
Why would anyone base their debate on "people they know"?!
What kind of conversation is worth having with someone who doesn't understand observation bias and has a main character complex?
These are outliers.
Think of motivation. Most people who live financially comfortable lives will want little more in the way of wealth when balanced against risk and effort. They also have something to lose. Their circumstances shift the incentives.
Now think of the temperaments of people who chase wealth. If they come from money, then the comfort they live in is not going to satisfy them. If they come from financially less than stellar backgrounds, they may be more likely to crave that kind of attainment; money is a kind of unfamiliar blank canvas onto which they can project all sorts of fantastic expectations (most of which are bogus). And unlike the better off, they have less to lose. Add to all this an inferiority complex that can compel compensation behavior. They may have a tougher start financially, but psychologically, they are more compelled by their circumstances than their wealthier counterparts.
So we should avoid being reductive.
And we should stop reducing “success” to money.
I don't think anyone in this particular thread was necessarily reducing or equating success to money, they were merely pointing out examples in which certain folks attained financial success. The parent-most comment was referring to the importance of a safety net in order to get more chances (whether it's risking it to become a business owner, or going back to school, or whatever your definition of success is).
And it's true. If you have a good financial safety net then you can take more chances and increase the odds that your next risk will be the one that works out.
Of course, the most easily quantifiable definition of success is usually financial, and on and off HN, it's probably the most common definition of success.
For me myself, I'm grateful to be doing well financially. I grew up in an upper middle class family. But I still do want to grow my wealth. I am not going to take wild risks to do so, but I'll work hard and use my current wealth wisely to grow it. What will more wealth get me? Financial security, freedom. It'll give my wife and me the freedom to choose if we want to stay at home with the kids. It'll let us easily fund their college, or whatever education or path they decide to pursue. The goal isn't being a billionaire. It's freedom and security.
I think that's success for a lot of people, and it usually manifests itself as just having more money because that's the first step. But it's not always the end goal.
You can choose to think that op meant only the most insanely rich billionaires. I thought they meant their actual experiences with peers. Cut out the outliers and be realistic and I think it’s easier to understand the point without the extremism. The range of what people consider success is quite large.
Yes, it's a bit forced trying to turn someone's anecdotes that spur some food for thought into some kind of a categoric stance.
They asked the parent who they were thinking of, a more recent example of an "up and coming" billionaire would be Palmer Luckey, whose life experience seems to be at least consistent with his stance against optionality.
Edit: Ref
"A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy … They’re always pursuing everything with optionality. ’Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody. I need to be able to sell my business in any way. I need to have liquidity in any way. I need to make sure that I’m not closing myself off to future romantic partners. I need to make sure I’ve got my options open. I need to make sure that I’m not going to buy a house and settle down in one place and lock myself down. Oh, having children. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not ready to commit to that path."
https://archive.is/BlzA9
Puer Aeternus,,,
I chose those examples because they’re well known and public. I asked for counter examples and no one seems to be able to share any.
I posted some as a reply to one of your other posts.
Why do we need well-known, public examples? I think it would be absurd to assert that there are very few successful founders that don't come from wealthy families. (Just as it would be absurd to suggest there are few that do come from wealthy families.)
Musk came to Canada with a few hundred dollars to his name. Worked on farms. Never got a loan from his dad, afaik.
It’s probably true that he could have somehow gone back to South Africa as a “safety net” if you will, but I believe that would’ve been the last thing he would have wanted.
If you’re really poor, you can’t take a plane to another country and start a new life, sure. But out of those people who could, if they scraped their resources together, how many do?
This isn’t to blame anyone. I would suppose that the vast majority of people would not want to be Elon Musk. Would not want that kind of life. But for the claim that he is what he is because it was served to him on a silver platter by his family just isn’t supported by any facts.
What was Musk families net worth?
I hear this conspiracy theory that he's was super rich. But owning a mine could mean anything from a basically bankrupt speculator to the De Beers. There's claims he gave Musk $28k ... that's not evena decent college fund.
From his dad's Wikipedia page:
>His lucrative engineering business took on "large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base." He also owned an auto parts store, at least half a share in an emerald mine, and even "one of the biggest houses in Pretoria."[12] His ex-wife Maye's book recalls that at the time of their divorce in 1979, he owned two homes, a yacht, a plane, five luxury cars, and a truck.[13]
Elon was 8 in 1979.
Only 2 homes? What a loser...
They had this amount of money
> As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.” [1]
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-made-money-ric...
The pocket emerald story that comes before that "we were very wealthy" line is even more telling. It's missing from that Independent article, but that article's based on this Business Insider interview: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-abou...
> Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewelers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’" Errol recalled in an interview with Business Insider South Africa. "And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1,200."
> A few days later the family returned to the store to find that Tiffany was selling the $800 emerald, now set in a ring, for $24,000 -- a markup of 30 times the price Elon had received for the gem.
> Errol has used the story as on object lesson in how retail works ever since. He was surprised but not concerned by the incident, Errol says, because money was plentiful.
> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”
So, selling-emeralds-to-Tiffany's-at-16 rich.
So his dad was so poor he kept his money in a safe ...
You can fit maybe 2 million in a safe. Maybe less if it's poorly packed, small denominations, other items in storage (id, etc). A safe full of money is like having an investment property, it's not really a sign of unreal wealth.
It's like some 20 year old on TikTok flexing a Rolex with aftermarket "diamonds" - it isn't dirt poor but it's not what you'd exactly call generational wealth. You don't even hear Trump bragging about having a ton of cash - even the crassest most trashy rich person wouldn't brag about a safe full of cash.
Half the posters here probably have parents with more assets.
Just look at how insanely biased people are here. Elon once allegedly stole $2k worth of emeralds from his dad, and they're gushing over what fabulous wealth that is.
$2k is a phone or a laptop. Elon was so madly rich he stole something as valuable as a laptop from his dad, and this is somehow evidence that he's basically a de Beers?
I can't tell if this is rage bait or not.
What do you disagree with?
1. A safe would hold less than $2M.
2. Someone bragging about less than $2 million in assets is not unbelievably rich.
3. People talk about Musk in a way that suggests his parents were extremely rich.
> What do you disagree with?
His parents are telling you they were very wealthy and you somehow managed to come to the conclusion that Elon grew up poor.
I guarantee you the median American isn't so wealthy their safes are overflowing with cash.
Over $2 million in assets about the time Musk was matriculating would have put in the top 0.1%, e.g. 1 in 1000. That would be fairly rich to me
Not 2 million assets. 2 million cash.
That seems pretty silly. Why keep your wealth as cash in a safe?
(And why not use a fraction of the money to buy a second safe, if you really have to keep it in a safe at home.)
To keep it away from the tax man.
Maybe. But wouldn't you rather hire a good accountant and lawyer instead of bothering with cash at home?
A good accountant or lawyer would tell you to pay the taxes you can't avoid.
The trick is to make as many taxes as possible avoidable.
I know nothing about this specific situation, so I'm not speak to that. I am speaking to "why keep your wealth as cash in a safe?"
I'm old enough that grandparents lived through the great depression. I know they kept wealth in a safe. A lot of their kids did as well. The grandparents had their gold money taken away, or their cash disappeared in banks. A lot of their kids followed along.
Being gen X, Elon has parents/grandparents that lived through the great depression and world war. That along with any other local factors makes keeping wealth in a safe not that unusual.
Elon Musk grew up in South Africa.
That was probably just their pocket money.
Well, there might have been some weirdness about South Africa at the time. Perhaps financial institutions had some weird weaknesses.
> That seems pretty silly. Why keep your wealth as cash in a safe?
Was it during the apartheid boycotts?
Musk took low wage jobs when he arrived in the US.
Is this some type of founders myth?
Musk left Canada at 17, went to college in the US and sold is first business in 1999.
But I also worked at low minimum wage job at 18 at Radio Shack while living at home with my parents driving the car my parents bought me. I assure you if I have lost my job, it wouldn’t have hurt. I would just spend more time hanging out with my friends and on my $4K Mac setup.
Musk was not going to be homeless if he failed.
Feel free to read a biography of him.
> Musk was not going to be homeless if he failed.
Right. He'd just get a job and rent an apartment.
I had a friend who started company after company starting in high school. Some were more successful than others, but he never lost his enthusiasm for the next company. The last time I saw him, he was living out of a trailer because he put everything he had into his next company. (Sadly, he passed a few years ago from an accident.) He left behind a large wake, and his memorial service was packed.
(He grew up in poverty.)
I'm not sure what point is being made here. AIUI, Musk comes from a wealthy family. Are you saying a biography would say otherwise?
I think the point people are making about the low wage jobs is that it's irrelevant. People from wealthy backgrounds take low paid jobs sometimes, so having done so doesn't imply he's a rags-to-riches story.
I'm saying Musk's company was not founded on family wealth. Even if it was, where are all the other trillion dollar companies given that lots of families have wealth?
> People from wealthy backgrounds take low paid jobs sometimes, so having done so doesn't imply he's a rags-to-riches story.
It does in Musk's case. Why not read a biography of him? It's more interesting than speculation.
Nobody said his company was "founded on family wealth". They said he had that wealth available as a cushion to fall back on should his ventures fail. They also never said "every person from a rich family can make a trillion dollar business". They claimed that those who found successful businesses are disproportionately from wealthy backgrounds, and provided a supposed mechanism: a greater ability or willingness to take financial risks knowing there is a limit to how far they can fall if they don't pan out.
Personally, I don't have any view on whether that is correct or not but it's obviously the claim that was made. It seems plausible but I'd want to see some actual data to believe it, not just anecdotes about a few of the most famous founders. Your points about low wage jobs and other trillion dollar companies are simply not relevant to it, and if biographies of Elon Musk contain information that would refute it you haven't said what or how.
Knowing you are an extremely accomplished man and fully capable of parsing this, I have to wonder why you seem blind to it.
> Right. He'd just get a job and rent an apartment.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting homeless people are homeless simply because they refuse to go out and get a job and an apartment. But as someone who's been homeless and someone who's a friend of people who've been homeless, a very large number of homeless people bust their asses at work. Things beyond their control go wrong and they have no social safety net to fall back on.
Elon Musk could've vacationed barefoot in Southeast Asia for 5 years and still returned to be given some executive job offer, just as many other children of rich kids do. Most people don't have that level of good fortune.
> Elon Musk could've vacationed barefoot in Southeast Asia for 5 years and still returned to be given some executive job offer, just as many other children of rich kids do.
Except that is not what happened. He started doing menial jobs in Canada. He was never given some executive job offer.
You can do any job you want and take any sort of risk when you have a rich family. It's not exactly unusual for rich kids to do menial jobs to "build character" or get some experience before rocketing off to some other venture, knowing they have essentially unlimited money behind them to absorb any mistakes they might make.
> Musk was not going to be homeless if he failed.
I think I can safely say that about every single person I know from college with most being normies. No sane parent is gonna not put up their college student kid till they figure out their next step.
There is a huge difference between
1. “Son, here is $5000 to cover your rent, utilities and food for one month while you look for another job in San Francisco” and keep doing that for 6 months
And
2. “We can’t afford to help you pay your rent so you are going to have to break your lease and come back home to East MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska. You might be able to get a job at “Big John’s Fish Tackle and WordPress Shop” and maintain the local church’s blog.
I knew my parents would be able to do a cheaper version of #1 s/Atlanta/SFO and s/Small town South GA/Nebraska.
I had a friend who I graduated with who was the oldest of three or four kids and whose mom was a single mother who couldn’t afford to subsidize him.
I was able to move to Atlanta and get a lower paying job as a computer operator based on an internship the year before because I knew that’s where I needed to be. My parents did subsidize me for the first year while I hustled my way to a better job through networking. I couldn’t have done that in small town South GA.
He ended up moving to a slight bigger small town on the border of GA and Alabama that paid more, lower cost of living and lower opportunities
There’s no way you didn’t know anyone whose parents couldn’t put them up for a year. There are lots of people who go to college who’s parents don’t have 30k spending money
Putting up your son on the couch is not expensive.
And then they are in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska and having to maybe move from where the jobs are and where they can network. It is expensive to subsidize their living away from home.
Go to the books section in Amazon and search for "how to start a business with no money"
Yes, and usually the only people who make money doing it are the people selling the books…
If all you do is look for failure, it's easy to find.
Laughable that you believe this. Do you still after seeing all the counter evidence? Do you sit back and ask yourself, "I wonder if the world's richest man has a PR firm, one so effective it has me working for it part time spreading the lies."?
I read his biography. Which one did you read?
Of course you did, his PR team knew exactly who to market it to.
What's your source of information?
Agiography, you mean?
Zuckerberg’s salary today is $1 :)
I've seen quite a few of these funded entrepreneur-lifestyle kids now; I've worked (briefly) with many of their companies. Many of them are making enough of a real go at it such that I can't tell them from others, but quite a few don't know enough about how a default alive business works and deliver a DoA even when the core idea or a short pivot works and has traction - these guys need so much better PMF to succeed.
The best businesses I've seen parents find for their children are lettings agents (urgh) and basic manufacturing (last mile door assembly etc.). You can get the business model in a six month course, the staff are minimum wage, the product is high margin. If your parents buy the building you are so close to default alive its a joke. Grow the business, flip it, and try the big idea.
There is also survivor bias at play here.
Succeeding without safety net is hard -> only the best can do it -> the best entrepreneurs you know did not had a safety net
Then let’s control for that. Among people with a decent safety net, can we correlate eventual success with number of tries?
The answer seems self evident, but idk for sure, and I would like to know the Gini coefficient of successes vs failures among safety netters be that of non-safety netters. Wouldn’t we expect the successes within the safety net to be massively larger on average than those of the non-safety netters, given that a safety net affords you so many more swings to take? Your comment suggests that this is not the case, driven by the selection/survivor effect within non-safety net
I mean Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc all had a safety net.
Also need to define what successful means because a lot of trades people are successful solo-prenuers but don't make more than say a doctor.
In a thread about survivor bias, and you fall for the same trap. How many people coming from wealthy background end up failing?
Take Bill Gates, his father cofounded a law firm, and his mother was a board members of several firms. That is a very wealthy background, but not outrageously so. How many people of the same level of wealth became successful businesspeople? It's said that his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO at the time was a more instrumental factor to his eventual success than his family's wealth, and his own effort of course.
> It's said that his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO at the time was a more instrumental factor to his eventual success than his family's wealth, and his own effort of course.
This sounds a lot like "his family's wealth was a more instrumental factor than his family's wealth" since "being on a board" is pretty rarified air. It's not Gates-himself-level wealthy, but what percentile is that? 90th? 95th? 99th?
> but not outrageously so
Compared to 99.99% of the 8.3bn people on the planet, yes.
HN never ceases to amaze me with its conception of what "wealthy and successful" means.
> his mom being on the same board as IBM's CEO
When IBM came knocking, Bill Gates referred them to Gary Kildall. Kildall (for whatever reason) muffed the deal, and Gates didn't pass on that opportunity again. Gary had the opportunity, and came from a middle class company. He invested in his company with his own resources.
Gates received $5000 from his family for his business.
I've read accounts of Microsoft's early days. It was self-sustaining very quickly.
I also know something about compilers and interpreters. BASIC of that era was simply not difficult to create. Yes, Gates & Allen had access to a PDP-10 at Harvard which helped. But it was not required, as Woz proved by writing Apple BASIC in a notebook and hand assembled it.
I also know that Hal Finney wrote a BASIC in 1978 or so that fit in a 2K EPROM (for Intellivision). As I recall, it didn't take him very long.
So no, Microsoft is simply not a result of massive infusions of money. An awful lot of people had the ability to create Microsoft, what they lacked was vision, drive, and willingness to risk.
And no, Gates and Allen were not going to starve if they failed, even without their parents' money.
Okay can you name one successful modern day tech company whose founders didn’t come from money?
Not the OP, but I can name many: Andy Grove (Intel) , Steve Jobs (Apple), Larry Page, Sergei Brin (Google), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Michael Dell (Dell).
They all seem to come from solidly middle or upper middle class, so no poverty but not different than many of us on HN.
The argument was not that you had to be rich, just that you had a safety net so you could take risks and know you had a fallback without being homeless and hungry.
But the Google cofounders specifically both had parents who were early computer scientists or mathematicians
In all fairness, I haven’t been consistent between “coming from enough money that your parents can be your angel investors” and “you can afford to fail and call your parents for help with the rent”.
Your question is naming just one not coming from money. None of the people I listed did.
Wealthy background surely helps immensely, but other factors such as environment are vital as well. Google founders met at Stanford, in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the height of the dotcom era. That’s more important than their background.
Being wealthy is not the most important factor to one’s success. 50% of US population is middle class. Even if those I listed were all upper middle class, that would still be perhaps 5% of US population, or millions of people. Yet only a few rise to the top.
While not a tech company founder, Oprah Winfrey created a media empire. She was born to a teenage mother in rural Mississippi (and poverty).
If someone wants a story about overcoming one's lot in life through grit, hard work and making the most of situations/opportunities her story is one you'll want; maybe not as relatable as the Bezos, Dell, Jobs, Musk etc but a story that poverty->billionaire entrepreneur can happen. There is also a reason she is the only one I can think of that fits description.
NVidia
Jensen Hung’s father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He wasn’t going to be homeless and on the street if he failed.
And he didn’t come straight out college either. He worked at AMD and I’m sure he had established some type of financial foundation and I’m sure he could have easily found a job if Nvidia failed with his background.
>>Jensen Hung’s father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He wasn’t going to be homeless and on the street if he failed.
So now the goalposts are "isn't desperate" while a while ago it was "came from money". Having caring parents and being raised in culture that value education help. No one is arguing that.
>>And he didn’t come straight out college either. He worked at AMD and I’m sure he had established some type of financial foundation and I’m sure he could have easily found a job if Nvidia failed with his background.
He needed to get a job first like a average person before starting his own company. Privilege!
We have been talking about a safety net this entire thread and how you can make mistakes if you have one more easily than if you don’t
Huang's family must have had interesting connections if you consider that the daughter of his cousin is running AMD. And both were born in Taiwan and then went to MIT, which seems unlikely to happen without family money.
People, it wasn’t just a safety net.
Bezos’s mom was his first investor, giving him $300K.
Then he also had connections to millionaires through his family
Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Gates, was instrumental in securing Microsoft's first major deal with IBM through her connections. His family was wealthy and provided connections and support
Bezos's mom giving Bezos 300k was more of a favor to the mom, not the kid. He was already VP at DE Shaw at the time.
What about Replit? Two guys in a coffee shop in Jordan, you cannot be much further from Silicon Valley. They got turned down four times from YC and decided never to try again. But pg fell in love with the startup and urged him to try again. Then during the interview one of them got into a heated argument with Michael Siebel and thought for sure he had failed.
Yet he got in without a wealthy family and an American Ivy League degree. There are lots of other examples, I can even think of a one in Michigan.
And how many of the thousands of YC companies have disappeared in to obscurity?
How many of these do you think will see a successful exit?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
And “raising funding” is not a successful business. Having an exit where you as the founder makes an outsized return is.
Another definition is being profitable. Any idiot can sell dollars for $0.95 backed by VC’s hoping to find the “greater fool”
Sure, but if Bill Gates was a drug addict with no software, there would have been no deal and he certainly wouldn't have been successful.
Whenever I see the topic of success, people LOVE to talk about 'survivorship bias' as a way to somehow discredit the person that is successful and also give an excuse as to why they might not be successful.
It's pretty destructive in a community that's supposed to be about startups and building businesses. This is why I originally came here years ago, but it seems like the mindset has shifted to anti-capitalist group think.
No one is discrediting his success. It’s just the banal idea of if you have “grit” and work really hard, you are somehow guaranteed success or even have more than a slim chance.
"It’s just the banal idea of if you have “grit” and work really hard, you are somehow guaranteed success"
When has anyone ever said this? I can study for a test and still fail, but not studying ever will guarantee failure.
"Grit" and hard work may not always equal success, but it will improve your odds to the point where success is very possible.
What is the other way of going about things? Assuming you will fail and never trying?
Find companies that make a lot of money and convince them to give you some of that money in exchange for your labor if you want the best risk/reward ratio.
I would much rather be in the position of an intern I mentored who at 22 made over $700K in gross income between cash and RSUs (that could easily be converted into cash unlike “equity” in private companies) their first four years out of college than some struggling founded trying to start yet another AI company so grateful they got $200k from YC while still eating beans and rice that they had to split among three founders.
> giving him $300K
Yes, and cities are filled with $300K and up houses. The idea that Bezos started Amazon with unusual vast wealth is wrong.
Yes. But how many can and will give their children $300K in cash? Did she refinance her house and use the cash to give to her son?
If you can buy a house for $300k, you can invest the money instead. If you choose "house", you're going to have a much harder time accumulating wealth.
I wish I hadn't bought a house instead of investing it all in MSFT. I know people at the time who borrowed every dollar they could and plowed it into MSFT. They became very, very wealthy. I was too chicken. Bwaaack, cluck cluck!
Or you could have invested in every YC company that went public.
https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
You never hear about the people who made bad investments.
Or everyone who invested their life savings, refinanced their house, withdrew everything from their 401K and still failed.
If you have a paid off house you have some place to live, the alternative is to be paying rent that goes up every year.
My rent in 2016 before I had my house built was $1800. My mortgage was $2300. By 2024, rent had gone up at the same place to $2400. My mortgage besides property taxes and insurance won’t go up nearly as much[1]
It reminds me of people in BigTech that don’t sell their RSUs as soon as they vest and diversify. I make just as much now in cash as I did in BigTech with the difference being 40% was in RSUs. Why would I keep 40% of my income in AMZN any more than I would take 40% of my cash income and put in AMZN?
[1] Anecdotely I sold in 2024 at exactly twice the price I had a built for in northern Atlanta and bought a condo in state tax free central Florida for half the price.
If you don't want to take the risk, then don't do it. But criticizing others who do take the risk, and succeeded, isn't fair.
A general rule is the more risk you're willing to take, the more potential for gain.
I am criticizing the idea that all it takes is “grit” and if you work really hard you will succeed.
Thought experiment: 10 people out of college take “huge risks and work really hard”. A second set of 10 people just get boring enterprise Dev jobs and the third set all work in BigTech for 10 years. Rank the three groups in the order of expected median total income over the decade?
> I am criticizing the idea that all it takes is “grit” and if you work really hard you will succeed.
Ok, but I did not suggest that.
Working hard is not good enough. It's necessary to work at the right things - and it is hardly obvious which are the right things. Taking risks is also necessary. The bigger the risks, the bigger the potential gains.
But nothing is guaranteed.
Spending one's youth playing video games diminishes your chances of financial success to around zero.
Someone working in BigTech making over a quarter million a year less than 3 years out of college has a much better chance of success and playing video games after working 8 hours a day 5 days a week than a “founding engineer” or even a founder of yet another YC backed AI company doing “996”.
> It reminds me of people in BigTech that don’t sell their RSUs as soon as they vest and diversify. I make just as much now in cash as I did in BigTech with the difference being 40% was in RSUs. Why would I keep 40% of my income in AMZN any more than I would take 40% of my cash income and put in AMZN?
I mean, I didn't sell my RSUs as soon as they vested, because I worked for a BigTech company that I believed was on the upswing, and I was willing to take that risk of not selling.
Sure, it is an equivalent of buying those shares on your own, but again, it still felt way safer (and way more flexible/liquid, as I could sell my shares at any moment) to me than working at a startup with extremely illiquid equity. And I was already pretty much broke with no safety net (my internship over the summer back then made me more than my entire family combined earned in ~6 months; this is not an internship flex, there were plenty that paid more, this is just to illustrate the gap between some bigtech internship salaries and what my family was making), so I was willing to take the risk.
The risk ended up paying off, and that BigTech company went from ~$60/share to $300+/share in barely 5 years, turning my initial stock grant into a lifechanging amount for someone in my position. No, it isn't even close to being enough to buy a house outright or retire, but it is my (and my family's) safety net now. I can afford to help my sister pay rent with zero "can i actually afford it" thought in my mind.
TLDR: yes, not diversifying is risky. However, you cannot make lifechanging money without taking risks, whether it is through joining a promising startup or not diversifying your investments or anything else. I am not advocating anyone to do what I did, as I agree with you that selling RSUs on vest is the most safe option. There are no totally safe options for making lifechanging (whatever that means for you) amounts of money, so you gotta pick your poison, if that's something you want. For me personally, making bigtech salary at a company that I believed was on the upswing (and saving a good amount of it), while keeping all vested RSUs in my account (and selling no more than 5% of it each year), was an acceptable level of risk (that I wouldn't regret doing, even if the price of those shares ended up dying significantly).
Why wouldn’t you at least cash it all out and diversify into all of the Big 5 then or Mag 7 now?
Look at success in buckets. 10x , 100x, 1000x etc
I wouldn't assume size of success is correlated with "having success or not." It's notoriously hard to predict what business ideas will succeed at all, let alone be mega-billion-success-stories. Many things could've gone differently leading to Bezos being a ten- or hundred-millionaire vs a multi-billionaire even in worlds where Amazon was successful. AWS, for instance, was not in the original plan.
I think the strongest correlations would be between:
"has safety net" and "has success" - one major factor here is not having a poverty mentality that would lead to panicking and quitting early
as well as between "has safety net" and "takes multiple swings if no initial success", for the direct reason of "can afford to do so."
Citation needed that panicking and quitting early is a "poverty mentality".
I believe we all intuitively push whatever our advantages are, often without even knowing it. The advantage that the wealthy have are connections, capital, and familial support. These advantages lend themselves to activities such as starting businesses with high capital requirements, accumulating assets (“investing”), working through elite colleges to land a prestigious position, heading a philanthropy or charity, etc.
That advantage comes with a disadvantage. Because the wealthy do not have to work to earn their start, they never learn what hard work is capable of producing, and never build the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” habit. What they have in money, they lack in grit. When they are faced with a challenge, they habitually say “what can I buy to solve this problem?”, “who can I consult to help me with this problem?”, etc.
Contrast that with folks who are working class. They know that they don’t have the advantage of money. They learn that hard work is the behavior that yields the best outcome. They put themselves in fields where what you get is proportional to what you put in, such as the trades, where working long, hard hours can generate quite good income.
When folks who were raised working class are faced with adversity, they handle the situation like Boxer from Animal Farm: “I will work harder”. It’s what they know how to do. While they don’t have copious sums of money to fall back on, or other natural advantages, their own work ethic is one of the few things that cannot be taken away from them, and so they leverage that.
That advantage also comes with disadvantages. Someone who works very hard will likely be overly self reliant. They might not get as much done as they could have had they spread the load across other people. They might burn themselves out, injure themselves, work to the exclusion of all other goals in life, etc.
These are vast generalizations that obviously won’t hold in all circumstances, but I think it’s useful to illustrate the point. People use the tools at their disposal, whether that be money or otherwise. Those strategies all have advantages and disadvantages. The net result of those is likely visible in the outcomes of various people, I’d bet.
This is literally survivorship bias. All the successful ones you know of, because the unsuccessful ones failed, by definition.
I’d expect it to stratify based on the kind of business.
Typical small businesses (plumbing, HVAC, restaurants, convenience stores) I’d expect to come from poorer families. These businesses are a potential avenue to success without traditional credentials, and they’re not the sort of thing somebody is likely to start as a passion.
From wealthy families, I’d expect vanity businesses. There wouldn’t be as much motivation for the annoying aspects of a real business. And anyone who is interested in business can probably get a nice start in something their family owns or has a major stake in.
Moonshot companies I’d expect to come from the upper middle class, children of doctors and such. Not fabulously wealthy, so the potential for making millions can still be a big motivator. But comfortable enough to get advanced schooling and be willing to aim big with a chance of failure, rather than going for something mundane you know is always in demand, like fixing pipes.
Off the top of my head, Gates, Page, and Zuckerberg all fit that mold.
Good to share, but n=1 I suppose. For me (also n=1) it's the opposite in my circle. The ones without resources never went anywhere and reproduced their parents' class. The ones with resources that went into entrepreneurship (and had the possibility of failing and still being fine) are the most successful.
Agreed on your final point though! Tenacity probably is the biggest driver.
Every single western "entrepreneur" who starts making a little more than 100k/year likes to tell itself this story.
Did you have any (real, not GenZ) mental or physical disability?
Did you have a house to come back to every day? Did you have a hot meal waiting for you whenever you wanted?
Did you have a community that supported you through your business?
Did you have a legal structure around you that allowed you not to worry about getting kidnapped/killed? A structure that enforces getting paid after you've earned your money?
98% of what you have was given.
I do agree, however, that a lot of people don't even bother to put in the remaining 2%.
“Can you start a business without $10m of family capital” is a societal question.
“Can you start a business on an empty stomach without a roof over your head” is not the same debate. A roof over your head is a prerequisite to almost everything else in life - starting a business is WAY down the list. Better to have societies work to provide food and roofs - which they do, with varying degrees of success.
It is the exact same debate.
People without those things cannot play the lottery as many times as those who have them. They might not even get to play it once.
If everyone around you has all of those basic human needs met, you are the exception.
But of course people don't like to hear this, because their whole meritocracy myth (which has always been trash) comes falling down and they might be forced to admit that, please excuse me for making this outrageous statement, ... you're just an average person with slightly better luck than others.
(It is true, however, that "luck" compounds through your life and even more through generations, though. But that even detracts from the meritocracy myth even more, as the family you're born in greatly defines what you'll achieve.)
Becoming an entrepreneur happens most of the times merely for advancing one's personal financial success. But, another side of it, which doesn't usually get attention, is that you become a beneficial factor for the society at large, because you are assumed to be doing something good and appreciated by others to earn that money. (Otherwise, earning money without being willingly paid, would make you just a criminal). You are right, this "compounds through your life and even more through generations". Especially through generations. This is how the prosperous societies got here - people doing all sorts of things that led to prosperity. If you don't not live in a society like that, then your business should be building a society first. Put your brick in the wall.
It also means that, unless the state of the environment you're in has some "force majeure" as a cause, then the people that were before you haven't done that of a good job building one either. That's not an individual failure, that's generations of failure, don't you think?
And lastly, if the environment you described is the one you're residing in, that means you're far removed from that of the entrepreneur's (you're casting judgement on) and from his/her stance. How can that lead to a caracter judgement worth anything?
>If you don't not live in a society like that, then your business should be building a society first. Put your brick in the wall.
Totally agree.
I don't think anyone believes the idea of meritocracy applies to starving homeless slaves.
Luck is often the deciding factor in meritocracy, but we also make our own luck. You can have all the privleges in the world and still end up as a failson, it happens all the time.
What’s even funnier when I hear that my thought is “congratulations I guess??”. They are now making less than an average mid level developer doing CRUD enterprise dev 3 years out of school in any major metro area in the US.
That’s not even considering that the intern I mentored in 2021 is now making in the low $200s as an SA at BigTech at 25.
All of those things are great and should be afforded to every Person. In many places, they are.
Growing up I thought that my family was rich because my parents were still together, we owned a home with a foundation with help from the bank, and my family was clean. It turns out the bar was real low in my hometown.
"...didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net" As someone who grew up considered both a dirt poor hick by the city slickers and simultaneously a carpet-baggin outsider, this is often a relative perspective, how do we calibrate against a larger population?
These are the sorts of things I picked up on growing up: Could they go to college if they wanted to? Did their parents go to college? Did they live homeless, apartments, trailers, multi family, single family homes, McMansions? 0/1/2 parents around?
I suspect HackerNews may have some survivorship bias compared to national averages, (and especially where I grew up).
If most successful entrepreneurs are from ordinary backgrounds, one explanation is that most entrepreneurs, successful or unsuccessful, are from ordinary backgrounds. Another is that wealthy families might be pushing kids into entrepreneurship who lack the talent or taste for it.
> over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know
This very much sounds like survivorship bias to me.
But more importantly, I think the discussion is going off the track. The important ones are the 0.1%, not the 1% or 10%. The "normal" millionaire business owner usually actually worked for it (unless they are pure finance or something similar). They are also not the ones shifting a whole country's politics with their enormous influence. They don't have any over-inflated influence over anything. They are not the problem.
But they also don't serve as examples for the masses, because that would be confusing "anyone can do this" with "everyone can do this" - their successes don't scale. You can only have that many successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs, the majority must be their worker bees by necessity.
I see such discussions as distractions. If you talk about normal entrepreneurship you will not get to the core of our problems, not at the very top (the super rich), not at the bottom (why are so many so poor).
If you want to come up with an idea that works at scale you can't use one that only works for some no matter what. If you want to come up with a solution for the enormous imbalances looking at those normal entrepreneurs does not help either.
I suggest to develop an instinct to use in these kinds of discussions: For every concrete example, imagine it at scale. Thinking at individual examples when you talk about big things is a mismatch. Those examples are only useful if you use them to extrapolate upwards, what would actually happen if everybody did this?
If the most important factor in survivorship is number of chances you can take; and the number of chances is proportional to how much wealth you have; then the survivorship bias should go the other way. Otherwise it’s overwhelmed by something else, perhaps the sheer ratio of the differing populations.
When did you meet the successful entrepreneurs and business owners? Because unless you met them when they were starting out survivorship bias would account for that.
If you don’t have a fall back, you have no choice but to make it work.
Or fail miserably…
Which we don't hear about. Except maybe via GoFundMe.
You know what?
Peter used to say, that every successful company could look back at a defining moment early on, where they would have died had it not been for the courage, and the tenacity, and maybe the insanity of one visionary person who put it all on the line, even though it seemed like a huge mistake at the time.
A moment where all the metrics and the numbers didn't mean anything.
It was all about the emotion. It was about belief, rational or irrational.
And I think...
I hope that I just witnessed that.
On the other hand, no matter what you do, you can’t invest like Warren Buffett.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/11/19/why-you-...
The whole idea of succeeding by “grit” makes way too many people too idealistic and unrealistic.
Don’t get me wrong, Peter Drucker (hopefully that’s the Peter you are referring to) had some great actionable advice. But believing in yourself and having grit is about as banal as “thoughts and prayers”
I hope it’s Peter drucker instead of Peter griffin
You know what? This is indeed where courage, tenacity, and risk-taking make a difference.
But what makes the difference in whether or not we hear about it is pure luck and survivor bias.
If their luck was just right that with all that push in the right time the deal came through or the product sold, then we hear about what a great success it was, and how important was their grit.
And many smart determined people with all the courage, tenacity, and risk-taking in the world have also taken the big risk, but dice did not roll their way, or the hill was just so steep it didn't work, so we hear nothing of them. And their number likely vastly exceeds the few for whom it did work.
At one point in Tesla's path, Musk was down to a net worth of $200k or so. He laid his entire fortune on the line. How many of us would be willing to do that? Not me.
Is that courage or ketamine? I'm not sure there's anything aspirational there, or just a huge streak of vanity. Just look at all the plastic surgery.
If you think taking drugs is the key to success, well, it's not a path I'd try.
I did say, "I'm not sure there's anything aspirational there."
But clearly it does have a chance at success, as evidenced by Elon. Or, as it always turns out, it's difficult to fail anywhere but up when you're wealthy.
[flagged]
This is distorting my words in such tiny, pedantic, strawmanful ways I don't see a point in replying properly. I'm clearly not going to be the person to break through your illusion.
Honestly it's probably just best to flag a comment like this without replying and move on.
Walter isn't some quarter wit user who doesn't know that he's doing here.
He's posting trash and getting away with it because of his reputation.
It's dismaying.
Thank you for calling this out. I'm shocked it doesn't happen more often. It really ought to.
It should but it won't because people on here have developed a parasocial relationship with Walter and he's become a sort of minor celebrity on HN.
I mentioned this to Dang recently[0] and he's ambivalent about it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610620#45637851
In that discussion you seemed to agree that there's not much we can or should do about it; you seemed to be indicating that you were just contemplating the phenomenon, rather than complaining or arguing that something needed to be done.
For what it's worth: the “celebrity” effect works both ways. Sure, some members of the community may be more willing to give them a pass. But other users will be more motivated to downvote and/or flag, even if the comment is relatively benign.
At a young age and knowing I could easily get a job and rebuild? Why not? $200K to get back is a year a two in Silicon Valley just working in a tech company.
By 2010 with a combination of divorce and over investing in real estate before the financial crisis I had a negative net worth of over $200K at 36 years old and absolutely no money in the bank. I really didn’t stress at all. They were just numbers.
I had a job, a home and parents who could help me out a little when needed mostly for unexpected expenses because my credit was also shot by 2013 with 5 foreclosures/short sales.
At 51, remarried for 15 years and grown (step)kids and working remotely, and a lot of other quality of life changes, we are good.
Going from $200 million to $200 thousand in a few months is a terrifying drop.
No, you cannot make $200m overnight from $200g.
The question was whether I would take a chance with my last $200K.
Musk did. Most wouldn't.
Young and knowing your future earning potential? That’s. I different than paying $200K for college. That’s only slightly more than the average new grad makes working at any of the BigTech companies their first year.
What else was he going to do? Hoard it in a High Yield Savings account?
Cortez burning^Wscuttling his ships.
And if making it by hoping really really hard doesn't work, try suicide or something?
I also disagree with the GP (with the definitive explanation; it's probably at least partially true), but this:
>> basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net.
is not statisically accurate; you're only looking at survivors. The successful Gates/Zucks/Musks might outnumber the poor Indian kids; we need both the failure counts and some sort of qualitive definition of success/failure (i.e. a rich-kid failure is probably not life destroying)
Is this statistically true or just your experience? I'd be very surprised if it was more than just anecdotal.
> They just went all in on their goals when they were young and had many years ahead of them to start over if it all went wrong.
Lots of well-resourced kids do this and more can do this. By the law of averages they should be overrepresented in successes here.
> When you come from such resources and wealth that you don’t need to succeed and you can drop the business as soon as it becomes difficult, it’s a different situation.
Does needing to succeed make businesses succeed? I don't think so, tbh.
Of the people, did any fail?
If so, this is one of the questions that matters most when assessing whether or not there was a safety net— in failing, did they either wind up at the destitute/homeless/food-bank level, or a mountain of unpaid debt holding back future endeavors?
If the ones who met with failure didn’t face these things or something comparable then they did have safety nets.
The defeatist attitude in the reply’s to this comment are unreal. Try hard or don’t. It’s up to you. At least with the one way you might have a chance.
Acknowledging e.g. people who grow up in multilingual households usually have an easier time learning a new language than someone who didn't shouldn't just be about what decision an individual should make for themselves, it's about identifying what stimulates that kind of growth so we get more of that success overall. I.e. making a decision or not to go for the chance myself is a different topic than trying to find ways to increase the chances for everyone.
Economic growth is not a 0 sum game so why talk about the situations around it from only an individual gain perspective. If a lot of individuals are saying some situational factor makes the choice unreasonably hard then that's something worth focusing on rather than dismissing.
Acknowledging reality isn't defeatist. It's very likely that successful entrepreneurs statistically do come from richer families. We shouldn't ignore this fact because it's more fun and emotionally rewarding to us to pretend otherwise
Most attempts fail and if you get into debt you don’t get to try again.
I agree that it takes a special kind of person to try and try again, but it clearly is not for everyone.
A lot has to come together, you need to be alone, have a very supportive partner or be a sociopath (willing to drag your family down with you). You need to be in the right place (or have the means to move there). This usually works when you are young, so definitely having starting capital from somewhere works. This was much easier in the marking moments of technology where any simple tool or game could be transformed into cash. Nowadays you really need to luck out.
Europe has generally better safety net and much less entrepreneurship spirit for example. So it pushes both ways.
I guess one last thing is this weird thing in the US where investors somehow like people who previously failed. Like Elizabeth Holmes who reportedly went from prison right back into the game. With that environment of course it makes sense to just try again.
Reminds me of the whole you can only succeed when you don’t have the reassurance of a safety net weighing you down idea from dark knight rises.
Well, how many non-successful entrepreneurs and business owners do you know?
> looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net
There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).
That's kind of true. If you have a safety net, you kind of make the wrong decisions, optimize stuff that doesn't cut through the noise and leave something on the track. It's like that scene in Dark Knight Rises where he only makes the impossible jump out of the prison when he doesn't have the safety rope.
Would be interesting to run the priors on this and say what is the probability of startup success given "rich" "middle class" and "poor".
Otherwise maybe more poor people try startups so success will be biased towards them (rich will take over daddy or mommy business... maybe take a shot at a startup for fun but say meh lets try the business, plus there are waaaaay fewer rich).
Or to put it another way: Most people who live >100 are also from modest backgrounds too. As are olympic gold winners. Us paupers are the best!
you can extend that to all Silicon Valley and the US in general.
It has one of the weakest social security systems. Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed. Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
I agree with the other commenter: safety nets and multiple tries are always good to have, but persistence and grit are even more important, and these come more from necessity.
> Yet it out innovates all of Europe, Canada, Australia, other places that have incredible social "safety nets".
Probability: highly unlikely.
Speaking for Europe, I see a lot of silent innovation. No press, no LinkedIn posts, not an article on their website. There are a lot of US firms that shop in Europe for high tech. (I know of instances were the US company buys the IP from the EU supplier + take public credit for it + forbids the supplier for showcasing their success in public.)
What is different is:
1) the amount of money available in the US. The US enjoyed a very beneficial position post-WOII, enabling them to run high deficits.
2) the US has a positive attitude to entrepreneurship. You are not a failure when your company goes bankrupt, you learn from it and you go-go-go.
Also the EU lacks a unified capital market where infinite VC money can be pooled together into any new hype. I would argue this the biggest reason.
EU countries also have very high tax rates, which feels like the community is the primary beneficiary of your business, not you the entrepreneur. This alone severely reduces the financial incentive of starting a business. There's also some weird cultural stigma in the EU's more socialist countries (like France), where the system is way more comfortable for you as an employee rather than a risk taker. Let's call a spade a spade.
The way you say it, it sounds like the EU shouldn’t have any companies at all, but that is not true. In fact, the EU is very good at boring tech, which is the reason why the US is imposing high tariffs.
What is silent innovation? Do you think there are no silent innovation in the US?
Productivity is lacking in those other countries. That said, I don't think it has to do with safety net, which is not much different in the U.S.
You can have all of the “grit” you want to and still fail. You just never hear about the failures.
Most of the US graduates have their degree and a network to fall back on. It's nice to have actual money in the bank, but it can also be acceptable to have a high chance of getting a rewarding job if the moonshot doesn't work.
In other words, human capital.
Most of the entrepreneurs I meet are not going to be homeless if things don't work out. They'll be employed.
Exactly this many also have parents who can help subsidize them, stay on their parents health insurance until they are 26 and worse case move back home. This isn’t just the privilege rich, this can also be your mid to mid upper income couple who can help their kids out.
Yep, and most of these fallbacks are insurance-like: you can always say you never asked your parents for anything. Like me. Thing worked out, so I didn't need their money. But if they hadn't, I would have a place to sleep and eat.
"But if they hadn't, I would have a place to sleep and eat."
Forgive me for asking, but (if it's acceptable to reduce it to that) isn't joining the army or something gets one covered? The army service would come with the added bonus of not letting you go soft in perseverance and risk taking areas.
/sarcasm
Europe innovates. What it creates less are large monopolies. What America creates much more then Europe is winner takes all markets with little competition and large powerful companies on top.
Necessity is too fallible though, if Bezos was driven by necessity he would have sold Amazon in 1996 and retired.
That level of success requires either just pure psychopathic drive or some kind of deep anger that forces you to keep proving yourself again and again.
Beyond the lack of safety nets, etc., we just have a culture in the USA where you continually have to compete to prove your value as an individual.
There was some story I read where Farmers wanted to get immigrant laborers to work longer hours, so they offered a temporarily increased hourly rate. Like for the next month we pay $5/hr instead of just $3. The thought was workers would work like mad to hoard as much of the increased rate as they could. The opposite happened, they started working less because they just wanted $X/month and then to relax the rest of the time. That always stood out to me as a stark example that our American psychology is not at all universal, and is kind of perverted in certain lights.
> Not even proper healthcare is guaranteed.
…except it is. Health insurance is available on a sliding scale based on income and essentially free for most low income people.
In some areas and for some people, Medicaid probably does count as proper healthcare. But it certainly doesn't for other people / other places. Imagine there being one doctor within a multi-million person metro area who takes Medicaid for some sub-specialty. 90 minutes away from you by car. And you don't have a car. This is the reality for millions of Medicaid recipients, including ones I know personally in Chicago.
Not Medicaid, subsidized ACA. I know a lot of young healthy people that just take the chance of not having health care. Worse case you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip if you have to go the emergency room.
I don’t think my older (step)son has had insurance since he got off our plan at 26 over two years ago.
Sure, although in some areas healthcare is effectively unavailable to Medicaid plan members because providers have stopped accepting those patients. Being insured doesn't mean much if you can't schedule an appointment.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicaid-insurers-doct...
It's like a baseball game. Most people are benched their whole lives. They never get a chance at the plate. More privileged people with a lucky combination of the right family, the right education, the right timing, and the right opportunity get an at-bat, and they'll either strike out, or hit the ball. A few very lucky people will get to stand at the plate maybe once or twice more.
The wealthy get infinite at-bats. They get to stand at the plate for however long they want, and swing and swing until they get their home run. I worked with a founder like this. He would always talk about his business's humble beginnings, starting from a garage and so on--you know the story. What he would neglect to admit was this was like his 7th try. Every time he failed, he'd just chill on his family's couch, dreaming up his next startup idea.
I think it was Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) that talked about a similar concept as well. Ignoring the 10k hour thing, it also talks abut small compounding advantages that later add up to more opportunity (for those that take it).
To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill.
There was also a similar concept floating around about darts, where the poor get maybe one dart to throw, middle class a few and wealthier get many. But I can't remember where I saw or read that
Baseball isn't popular world-wide. The most popular game here is football (that sport which USA calls soccer).
Darts would be a funny way to make the analogy. It is very much a sport performed by people from the low class, since it is relatively easy to perform and practice in pubs. But you still need to have some money to buy a beer at a pub, ie. it ain't the homeless playing. The most poor people can barely afford their rent, and work off their ass doing so. Single mother with three jobs has near 0% to start a successful business.
I'm not sure why analogies are needed.
There's an old saying: Time is money. Flip that around: Money is time.
If you have money, you have more time, more opportunities to try things in order to find success.
You can read all about how to play an instrument, or how a bike works, but you'll never learn to ride or play without time to practice.
Thanks for the book mention. Adam Grant also talks about the age-group concept, but leans on it for a different end, in Hidden Potential.
The description sounds like a part 2 or updated approach/angle to Mindset (Carol Dweck), a book that made a changing impact when I first read it, but reading the updated edition years later left me wanting more. I had also read a couple of Adam Grant's earlier books and enjoyed them, will definitely check out Hidden Potential.
This is not true. No matter how many different teams I try out for, I as a 51 year old short male with a limp will never be a star basketball player or ever make it to even the D leagues.
There are plenty of people who tried repeatedly to “succeed” in their own company and failed. Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress
> Let’s say I did try to start my own company at 22 10x and spent 3 years at each one. I’m now 52 and would have been better off just working those 30 years and saving and investing with a lot less stress.
Some people would succeed eventually, others wouldn’t. I think it’s really hard to effectively gauge what the chances are cause you’ll see a lot of survivorship bias and a bunch of grifters with courses and blogs and stuff that try to pass it off as a reproducible skill.
I wonder what dataset would show real world outcomes well, especially since failed startups won’t be catalogued as well as people trying to enter the dining business and most of them going under.
At 52, how large would my success have to be to make up for all of the years and compounding I could have made just working at a 9-5?
Depends on the 9-5 and the country you work in.
If you'd work for decades in the Baltics, let's not even assume just software development, in absolute terms you wouldn't make that much: the median salary is below 2k EUR per month, the taxes also make a dent, as do the expenses.
You can look at the mean disposable income figures for Latvia here, for example: https://data.stat.gov.lv/pxweb/en/OSP_PUB/START__POP__MI__MI...
Effectively, the savings rate for most of the households is pretty bad: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/economy/23.11.2023-latvia...
So with living relatively frugally and having 1000 EUR of disposable income per month, and a similarly optimistic savings rate of 5%, each month you'd be able to put away about 50 EUR, or 600 EUR per year. You can calculate how that might compound with investments but you're putting away 6k per decade.
Obviously it's better for software developers, but there might also be unexpected expenses along the way, and so on but the overall trajectory is clear - depending on the life circumstances, working a 9-5 will ensure you live pretty poorly and that might lead to higher risk tolerance for entrepreneurship (or crime, go figure).
As for those born (or living) in a prosperous country, good for you! The equation shifts there a whole bunch, as well as depending on class or other opportunities.
You as a short 51 year old could create your own league. Be a star. But no you cannot play in other leagues with younger players.
See my other comment about being able to create a product and not having a go to market strategy or sales is like thinking just because I can dribble doesn’t mean I would succeed in the NBA.
I think the level of success one wants also require having a check for delusion and realism. If a "51 year old short limp" thinks they are going to be a star basketball player, they are delusional and no longer realistic.
How many people right here on HN have you seen over the years who built something and had no idea about marketing or a go to market strategy or knew anything about sales?
That’s the equivalent of a 51 year old with a limp not being self aware enough to know that I don’t have the skills to be a basketball player just because I can dribble.
So you agree with the parent commenters actual point and counter-example, great!
If your energy is finite (which is normally the case), the effect may also depend on the energy per shot you spend. A birdshot allows you to hit great many possible targets, but only very weakly. A buckshot hits fewer targets, but packs a bit more punch. A FMJ bullet shot from a sniper rifle allows you to hit an exact target with a great force, but you have to choose carefully.
What worked for me best was looking around a lot, identifying a few worthy targets, and aiming well.
Completely Agree.
Both Romans and Mongols have lost/retreated many battles. They just had to regroup and raise another army over and over again. Some of their opponents could not even afford the war even after winning over them multiple times.
The other sides simply were more fragile, where you were defending and once your city falls, you are done.
Avoid risk of ruin. Keep the ability of taking multiple shots with upside in your favor.
You need to have the money, the energy, and patience to experiment until you get it right.
Money: do it while you’re young and don’t need a lot. Or get first rich. Or collect enough money on a dream.
Energy: again being young helps. Having 2 smalls kids and old parents doesn’t.
Patience: that’s the more esoterical part. It’s hard to know when to keep on grinding and when to quit.
The key ingredient is the courage to try, not the safety net. Countries lauded for their strong safety nets are not overflowing with people taking ambitious risks. Often quite the opposite; the strong safety net reflects a cultural aversion to risk.
People with the courage to try don’t need a safety net to do it. In practice they seem to be almost inversely correlated.
An important aspect not mentioned is feeling like you will be adequately rewarded if your calculated risks pay off. This seems to be more pertinent than safety nets in practice.
Look at the founders of the top 100 most valuable companies in the US. How many of them came from poverty?
That is insightful. Courage to take risks means higher standard deviation in outcomes, more visible successes, but also more hard failures. Risk averse cultures have more stable outcomes, no big successes, but also less financially crippling failures. A personal or social safety net may or may not make you risk averse. Taking semi-calculated risks seems like a skill that needs to be learned for successful entrepreneurship.
Sure, but this argument will never mention those that were just as good that failed. Simply to selection bias.
Not sure I 100% agree. First: you can temper you ambition and thus the risk. You do not need to go ALL IN for almost anything. It may take longer or be fractional vs. the initial ambitions but probably also far more realistic. Second: the counter example of succeeding because you NEED to; the "burn the ships!" approach. If you know you can fail it inevitably tempers your efforts too. You might not want to do this if you're the sole bread winner for an entire family, but when you're young and independent? Maybe. Combine this with the first and I think there's lots of paths to success.
It's interesting how the American narrative changed from "hard work will make you succeed" to "only privilege will make you succeed".
I think the newer iteration is just setting the country for failure and is an excuse why being lazy is okay
How is (the assumption one needs) trying multiple times "lazier" than once?
The underlying subtext if I read it correctly is I had a lot of chances because I was lucky to be born into a specific background
when you start subscribing to determinism (i was ordained by my parents to succeed), the logical next step is not to try hard
Out of curiosity (not accusation, I promise) how did you make it?
If safety net was the key ingredient, European startups should killing it. And yet US without a safety net is doing so much better.
Well said, this is the real game to pursue. Best of continued luck.
I dunno... based on having worked for ~10 small to midsize companies now and getting to interact frequently with the founders at almost all of them, I wouldn't say a safety net was the common thread.
They were however all highly driven, a bit sociopathic, insanely confident and had some kind of chip on their shoulder. A few wanted to "beat daddy", some had wealthy wives and wanted to fit in with their in-laws, and others just seemed mad at something or someone in their industry and wanted to outdo them.
The #1 factor for success imo is being angry with reality and being arrogant enough to think you should impose your will on it. People who are given infinite chances will just fail a few times and settle into a safe life.
That sounds good, but with a safety net, are you really going to be hungry enough to make sure your one shot at getting out of the ghetto doesn't fail? The entrepreneur that says to themselves, if this doesn't work, I'll just ask mom for another $300k at St Barts over Christmas doesn't sound like the one sleeping under the desk at the office to get the demo ready for TechCrunch Disrupt. Or maybe they are (to prove daddy wrong). The human condition contains multitudes.
Gates, Bezos, Buffet, Musk all had enough hunger to beat out literally everyone else
And they also all came from money.
Ahh yes, classic HN: "People only succeed/work hard if their only other option is death"
My wife and I are starting to test this theory. We are putting our kid in an expensive school, then starting a business to support our lifestyle. If we fail, our kid’ll have to go to a cheaper school and we’d have lost a few years of school fees. If we succeed, yay.
By the time, our are faced with the choice, our kid will be embedded in school so ripping them out of it is going to be a tough choice.
So, yeah, we’re essentially burning our boats and fighting to survive.
Don't live above your means because an unexpected event is likely to happen. Plus creating a situation where all peers are rich and only your kid is not doesn't open the doors to future success compared to if they were at their peers lifestyle level.
We grappled with this too but in the end, our decision was influenced by our parents choosing to live beyond their means to put us through good schools and college. If they could grit their teeth and sacrifice for us, we can do the same for the next generation.
Our choice us somewhat made easier because we didn’t like any of the schools near us except this one. The others were focused on exams/results and were larger in size so felt more “corporate”.
I too have made this choice with my family.. and its one hell of a positive force-factor. My mom immigrated from Kiev, with nothing and a dream for her son to have a better life in NYC. Im now taking the same risks as a 5-time entrepreneur..now living in Buenos Aires as a single dad. Enjoy the ride - its short - live your dream - steer your ship or it will be steered for you.
More power to both of us!
> doesn't sound like the one sleeping under the desk at the office to get the demo ready for TechCrunch Disrupt
For what? Their garbage SaaS that barely works and is just a thin veneer for advertisers to gorge on my data?
> This is why having a safety net and resources to try again is so powerful.
The idea of a safety net is a silly idea. The whole world had very little safety net just 100 years ago, and we still managed fine to make progress and to get out of poverty (on average).
On the contrary, when you know you have very little safety net, you tend to try harder and to persevere a lot more.
> The idea of electricity is a silly idea. The whole world had very little electricity just 100 years ago. and we still managed fine to make progress
This is just an argument from tradition and not even a good one. It's debatable (and maybe impossible to prove) if it's even true. 100 years ago, the global economy fell into a huge decline that led to more global safety nets. Then, were there even less safety nets 50 years ago? And did that lack of existence not hinder progress?
> you tend to try harder
Is there any actual evidence for this? If I don't have a social net, I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to try harder at my risky, innovative product. I'm going to give up and do something 'safe' that only marginally increases economic output.
Would you like a golden sticker?
That's a cliche and it sucks. A safety net and family resources correlate with nothing related to entrepeneurship and risk taking.
This is definitely not true. How many people for instance can go into journalism and do unpaid internships without family support?
The entire idea of most entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their bootstraps in tech is a myth. Out of all of major tech companies now, how many of the founders came from disadvantaged backgrounds?
Safety net and resources correlates heavily in almost all aspects of your life, having a better life helps immensely in any project you do in your life, including entrepreneurship
> A safety net and family resources correlate with nothing related to entrepeneurship and risk taking
You might be on to something, just look at the examples here. Being successful in tech and a well-known risk taker seems strongly related to having a 4-5 letter last name. Bezos, Brin, Dell, Gates, Page, Jobs, Musk, Thiel...Zuckerberg, okay an outlier, but everyone just says Zuck -- so tossup?/s
The “one that works out” can also give you a misrepresentation of how the world works and a false sense of how lucky one should expect to be over a long period of time.
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
I have thrown away (in hindsight) amazing lottery tickets a hilarious number of times. Despite that poor track record, I have been able to grind out an enviable life sans lottery ticket. Showing up and being hungry is a huge part of the game. I’ve also had to reboot my career relatively late, which isn’t a place you want to be but it isn’t a death sentence if you don’t want it to be.
While there is an element of survivor bias to my story, people always underestimate the role of stamina and willingness to grind when no one else would. It is a very long game but so is life. I was never looking for the easiest way, and in hindsight I think that produced more satisfying results even if the path had much lower lows.
Well with the style of tech interviews we have, luck is definitely involved. Some questions are simply my style (I like graphs and dynamic programming for example), and I’m lucky if the interviewer happens to choose these. But I don’t like for example two pointers problems.
And also I’ve long ago dissociated my tech interview performance with my actual performance indicated by performance reviews.
Corollary: Choosing _not_ to do something is as much an action as choosing _to_ do something. Which shines a bright light on the meaninglessness of the phrase “the only actions regretted are those not taken”.
There's also the option of choosing to not commit to either action. One stays in the status quo without choosing it, but since agency is negatively correlated with regret and no agency was used, the 'choosing not to do something' option probably has a higher chance of being regretted.
Lol same. Left a great tech company where was doing well to pursue the startup life. "If I work hard, I will make it". Startup failed, and the same prior opportunity hasn't come around. Such is life.
A lot of people experienced that during the 2020 boom. The lucky break wasn't a lucky break it was just a huge hiring boom. Once that's over the status quo returns.
My lucky break occurred many years before the pandemic, but after the original dotcom boom. Companies were neither hiring nor firing like crazy.
Thanks for writing this, I'm in a similar position and feel the same way.
There was a time 10-15 years ago when there was a lot of discussion (including here on hn) on whether it's best to stay at a fang job or join a startup. It was basically a choice between making millions at a steady but intellectually unrewarding job or risking it all at a fun startup.
It just sounds like you are in a middle of another journey my friend.
You still only need one. Keep trying.
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> It’s allowed because it just runs locally like any overlay and doesn’t interact with their systems.
This is account is spamming - as in advertising on HN. This software is definitely not "allowed" during any typical leetcode interview. The website is very explicit and upfront about this being cheating.
They're also posting during the middle of the day in the country where the company making this product is headquartered, and it's 4AM in the country where the vast majority of HN users are.
I thought there was something very odd about the way this was written.
>Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere
Never mind, it's been written or at least edited by ChatGPT.
That is a horrible, unfounded accusation!
It contains multiple instances of classic ChatGPT phrasing, em-dashes, smart quotes, things that you simply never saw before 2020, etc. One of these in isolation and yeah okay it's an unfounded accusation, but I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
> em-dashes…things that you simply never saw before 2020
I’m sorry but this is patently false. Apple devices have been autocorrecting two hyphens into a em dash since as long as I can remember and I personally used them all the time before LLMs were a thing and absolutely saw them online. I try not to use them now because people will annoyingly call me out for using ChatGPT when I’m not.
I think Apple devices also default to “smart quotes” if I understand what you mean by that. For example I’m typing this on my iPhone and I get this quote character automatically when I tap the double quote button on the default keyboard: “
If I want straight quotes I have to long press the quote button and explicitly select it: "
I think on macOS it’s the opposite for quotes, but macOS will absolutely autocorrect double hyphens to em dashes.
> I don't understand how you're all not seeing how many posts on HN now are AI.
There’s a also a big difference between using AI to reformat/clean up your text, especially for non-native English speakers and a bot just spamming LLM replies, but none of your “gotchas” can discern the difference…
I didn't say em-dashes were never seen before 2020. Re-read the sentence. It's a list - "em-dashes" and "things that you simply never saw before 2020" are two items in that list. But even assuming I meant em-dashes, it's interesting to compare how frequent they were a few years ago versus now. Take the most upvoted HN submission (8 years ago):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16582136
There is on instance, an obvious copy-paste. Now go to any from the current top list. I count 10+ per submission, even on submissions with much lower post counts that the Stephen Hawking one.
But I'm not going around policing em-dashes or smart quotes and calling people out for using them. It's more like when someone gets a bingo in ChatGPT phrasing and style idiosyncrasies then it becomes suspicious and I'd hate to think I'm here talking to bots (I've already left many subreddits because for AI slop).
I've seen highly rated posts on HN that might as well have started with "You're absolutely right!"
> yeah okay it's an unfounded accusation, but I don't understand how you're all not seeing
Personally, I apologize for unfounded accusations. I think it would suit you to do the same, now that you’ve acknowledged it.
What did you hope to achieve with the accusation?
If you feel a comment is disruptive or off-topic, just downvote it IMO.
>I think it would suit you to do the same, now that you’ve acknowledged it.
I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid. It's clearly AI and I would bet my life on that post having been at least edited by ChatGPT.
>What did you hope to achieve with the accusation?
Plenty of online spaces are now full of bots posting and replying to other bots with the occasional human engagement. Some subreddits I used to post on are practically useless now with all the AI spam. Dead internet theory etc. If I wanted to talk to a bot I would use AI directly without pretending I'm discussing something with humans.
> I'm struggling to see why you think I acknowledged that my accusation was unfounded when I explained exactly why I think it's valid
You literally wrote “yeah okay it’s an unfounded accusation”.
I hope you can see why I thought that was an acknowledgement?
Sure I don’t want bots any more than you do, but I also don’t think it changes anything to blindly accuse anyone you think sounds like an LLM.. I mean, bots don’t self-destruct if you call them out or anything.
Engaging with bots likely just amplifies the problem (by causing them to respond), rather than just downvoting their posts.
>You literally wrote “yeah okay it’s an unfounded accusation”.
Do you start reading sentences from the middle?
To land at the the author's difficulty level, you need to not have chronic life-shifting catastrophes. That is, the sort of challenges that slot your life in a place where the long reaches are to keep housing and hopefully have food for the kids.
I started out where the author was. Well, roughly. +Kids, -Secondary edu. I could and did rise above that. And above 3 economy shifts that each reset my biz to zero.
I did not rise above my spouse being swapped for an adult with profound psych issues. I took on the single dad and caregiver roles well enough.
However, I could not overcome the daily sabotage of, well, everything. It's like a TV trope where you are shackled to your worst enemy. But you have to keep them safe and your loved ones safe from them.
It's tough to maintain a job schedule when the police frequently call you during the workday (w and w/o CPS). Or when your transpo is stolen and can't be replaced.
In short, it's particular tough to pretend to be stable. Eventually there are no bridges left to burn.
Thanks for the kicking back some reality in.
Some of these risks are hard to adjust for. I guess you've got to muster all the grit and keep walking.
Also BTW, you've shown enough but let me wish you more strength for you. All the very best!
> I did not rise above my spouse being swapped for an adult with profound psych issues.
This is much more common than people in their conditioned romanticism will ever acknowledge.
In the economy of the past 15 years, marriage is a much worse risk than an expensive education.
How damn hard, sending love
Seeing the other comments I feel like the luckiest moment of my life was meeting my future wife when I was at school with 16 and having been together since for 20+ years, through higher education and kids and house mortgage and all. Zero drama, mutual respect and affection, both still preserving some independence to maintain a „self“, good double income.
Might sound stupid, but this major life area being just a rock solid fundament frees up so much energy my peers still struggle with nowadays quite often it’s insane in hindsight. Everyday life costs are lower, some risk taking is possible when someone has your back unconditionally and even supports it (as long as not going reckless), and a secure home base to return to is something I guess even money can’t easily buy. Short of being born already rich I guess that’s a cheat code with similar small odds, and I appreciate it.
Then the „business opportunities“ become just something way more relaxed. Not identity level validation attempts or despair to get into a better life. Which again allows better judgement calls and reintroduces more fun and creativity into many things.
Just my 2c for perspective
I met my wife also at school at 16y and we're so glad and happy to be with each other since, 25y+. You put it in the right words:
> Zero drama, mutual respect and affection, both still preserving some independence to maintain a „self".
Just the income is from me alone which frees her up to have enough time for our kids.
Having such a long time and deep relationship is quite rare, I guess.
Unfortunately, the "one" which accepts you, is no guarantee of it being the one which "works out" (in the short or long term). My experience is now 4x "found one that ultimately doesn't work out" (each lasting 2 to 3 years).
I'm now taking time out to try to figure out how to escape the confines of the career path I've taken to find something different.
Open to suggestions of entirely different careers that I could switch to that might have higher odds of not being toxic rat-races full of people telling lies and bullshit just to survive.
But broader experience suggests the world of work just sucks these days (and yes, it's these days - our parent's generation had a brief period of doing 9-to-5 jobs which paid well enough to afford homes, have families and social lives and holidays. We don't get that now.). No wonder large numbers of my generation are dropping out of the workforce...
Maybe move to a different country with a better work culture? I don't know where you are from, I'm from Belgium and the only truly toxic corporate places I've seen here were the ones managed by Americans.
I think any huge tech company or private equity owned company will be a rat race. There are plenty of tech jobs that don’t fall under that umbrella. They might not pay as well, but they’re out there!
Genuinely, no sarcasm or whatever intended, I just want to broaden my horizons: what tech jobs did you have in mind? :)
I personally got one of those jobs at a smaller, "non-tech" (read: engineering) company, quite close to where I grew up. Got to pick my language and tools, have ownership of my slice of the product, live a very comfortable and flexible 9-to-5 where they gave me the room to do my best work. Pays maybe half of the typical inflated tech salary. But I'm doing well for myself.
My only issues at this point are 1) my life has bucket list things to check off that have nothing to do with work, 2) I'm running out of super interesting things to work on and entering a sort of maintenance mode on my program, 3) the old guard, who were all retirement age, are checking out for a new generation, with a new direction.
So all that being said, I've been looking for work far afield in places closer to my bucket list items. Hopefully, I can find another smaller, specialized company that needs a programmer with my skillset, because this experience has been fantastic.
I’m in data analytics for government. It’s got a ton of meaning, tons of ceiling for skill and talent, and very dedicated kind colleagues. No rat race except who can help people the most, not a legit title haha, but there are 2X analysts that inspire me. We also need DBA and tech team to power up our systems :)
I work for a small local company. There's ten people, basically all working some kind of part time. The work is interesting, the pay is peanuts, the atmosphere is great. Thank god it's Monday tomorrow!
We job hop, have multiple hustles. Many people on this board have started multiple companies, sometimes at once, on an ongoing basis. Do you only want just one friend? People tend to have multiple romantic/sexual entanglements, sometimes at once, but generally more than one over a lifetime.
I think this can be a useful maxim to get you to the next day, but in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life. We grow and change and need novelty. We are held in a web of interdependent, ever-shifting relationships - with people, businesses, material goods, ecology. I think that generally people are seeking connection in a broader sphere. To be held in community, to have multiple significant identities (mother/wife/boss), to live in richness and abundance where any one thing is not make or break.
> in reality it takes a lot more than one of anything for a fulfilling life
We seem to view "reality" through different lenses. I've usually found "one" to be a magic number; as long as it's the "right one." That's the gist of what he's saying.
In my experience, needing more than one, often signals issues that need closer examination.
In my community, we have a joke: "An addict is someone that needs two One-A-Days."
Getting from zero straight to the one is like winning the lottery. Most people need to get through multiple "ones" to find "the one".
Agreed. It’s not what I’d call a “fulfilling” process, though.
I find the same, individual jobs or relationships seem to give supralinear returns.
There's a lot of initial investment and groundworks, then once you're well-integrated, the marginal returns get higher for the most established relationships.
We can try to walk in 10-20 directions at the same time and move a tiny direction all, or none.
Or we can realize we have some things to learn that we will learn no matter whether we pick the startup, or job to learn transferrable skills and also become better well rounded.
Do you really think that is what the author meant? They're not saying "you only need 1". They're talking about going from 0 to 1. It's sometimes a long and arduous 0. Your framing doesn't help someone trying to get from 0 to 1. Once they're at 1 though, sure. But getting there can feel helpless, and that's what this post is about.
The trouble is how many times can you try. I tired building 6 businesses; all failed. I just don't have the resources to try again. I've lost too much. I am lucky to have been able to try at all. Like that parable floating around about the people and the carnival games, the rich own the game, the poor run the games and the middle class get a chance or two to play.
You've been trying for a long time.
What do you do if the job that makes you an offer doesn't excite you? What if the house that feels like home needs more repairs than you can afford? What if the program that accepts you has crappy funding? What if the person who chooses you has red flags?
Do you say "screw it," cross your fingers, and walk through the door that kind of sucks? Or do you keep looking as long as your resources last you?
Maybe consider that we are all calibrated to standards that are this hodgepodge of other people’s messaging of what standards should be, and they communicate them for a variety of reasons, very few of which are truly designed for your reality, your situation.
So when you say, ‘kinda sucks’, perhaps ask if the opinion is grounded in (your) reality?
Once recalibrated to accept that what we are in, is inescapable true life, then we stop looking for something better, and instead focus on the challenge of making it better than it should naturally be.
Happiness I believe, is a decision, we choose it when we feel it’s a sustainable perspective. I think it’s sustainable to allow ourselves to be happy, whenever we achieve marginal improvement on what is natural.
Every situation is different, and none of us can reliably predict the future. Sometimes dealing with a bad job until you get a better one is the right move. Sometimes it's the wrong move.
Specifics, about the job and yourself, matter. If you feel like sharing, this is a pretty good community with good instincts.
The magic in "all it takes is for one to work out" is in the strength it gives you to keep trying. Trying something that might fail is hard, even when we know that trying is the right thing to do.
My point is that, at least anecdotally, certainty is rare. Most of the time, for most people, the experience is less "yes!" and more "I guess."
More widely applicable advice would be how to deal with compromise, not how to hold out for "the right one."
There is no certainty, not about the future at least. In my experience, being able to face uncertainty without despair is one of the most important skills to have.
The interesting thing about "all it takes is for one to work out" is that it helps you face uncertainty. No matter how many times you've tried, you maintain the faith that the next time might succeed.
And it is all about faith, which is probably why it is so hard for us analytic/logic-driven people to adopt. But the opposite of faith isn't knowledge--it's nihilism. If the universe is an uncaring and even hostile place, and if there are no guarantees that everything will work out, and if the only certainty is eventual death, then why even bother, right? Nihilism is seductive because it is the philosophy most compatible with reality. It is what you're left with after entering the Total Perspective Vortex.
The only antidote to nihilism is belief. Belief that things will work out. That it's worth fighting for things, even if we often lose. That striving to be the person we want to be is worth something.
I know I've drifted far from your original point about how to deal with compromise. Again, I feel the answer depends on the circumstances. But I think a general answer is to decide what "the right one" means for you and nurture the belief that you will get there eventually. Once you know where you want to be and have the conviction that you will get there, everything else is simple.
Simple, but not easy. Maybe you've compromised for your current job. What will it take to get "the right one"? Is it more skills? Is it connections? Is it money? Is it courage? Maybe you don't know--that's okay. What's the next job that will get you closer to your goal? What do you need to get that job?
I guarantee that one of the things you need to do is simply try. Try to apply for a new job; try to learn a new skill; try to make a new professional connection.
That's when you remember "all it takes is for one to work out". Try and fail and try again.
Often the "one" you need isn't the ideal, it's just what gets you into the market. I'm thinking a job that gets you some experience and much needed pay or a property that lets you build equity while prices continue to climb.
These are not final decisions, get something going is better than nothing. You don't need to be locked on a job, or a house, or a degree. People have more time in their life than they seem to think. Sure, you might spend a few years on something not ideal, but the alternative being nothing is much worse
Right. All it takes is for one to work out, if you have several suitable options. If some of the options are only vaguely suitable, or it comes to light through the process that some of them are not suitable at all, then it takes more than just one working out. That's what I was thinking while reading this.
Bait & switch, though.
“All it takes is for one to work out.” is not the same as "You just need the one [job] that’s the right fit." or "You just need the one [house] that feels like home." or "You just need the one [life partner]."
Author's examples are, spiritually, the opposite of their friend's advice - in fact, "all it takes is for one to work out" is something often said to people who lost hope because they got lost being too picky.
Simplifications always leave something out. It's like the three body problem: people think one factor matters most, and one other factor controls it. But once they realize there is a third factor that alters one or the first two, or mediates between them, it gets more complicated.
A writers perspective: I like to pause from time to time and thank my talent and my education for training me to the point I can trully enjoy difficult classical work. And read it again and again when I miss it. Also being able to sit and write for hours is pretty incredible on its own.
Yes I have nothing to show for it. No money, no deals, no awards... And that upsets me 70% percent of the time. In a healthy way, where it just keeps me going back to the desk same time every day.
Rest of the time I really enjoy just being able to do it and being able to afford the time to do it. As one of the few in my family with degree and withouth second job.
I strongly disagree with the author. The mindset they described somewhat reminds me of body positivity—excess weight is not good for your health, accepting it through a mental shift is a bad advice.
Here is my personal advice to whoever reads this comment. Ignore everything they say on the internet. Do what works best for you. Trust your intuition. Set bold goals. Always learn and strive to become better in everything you do.
If you failed an interview, it’s perfectly ok to be disappointed. Spend a day calling your own self names. It’s normal! The very next day analyze why you failed, see where you need to improve. Rinse and repeat. This will get you whatever the hell you want in this life.
I agree about body positivity, but the big difference is we are talking about relationships here. Whenever it's a relationship, whether it's professional, platonic or romantic, sometimes it really is just them. But more often than not it's a bit of both, it's up to you to decide whether you want to make it about them or make it about you. If it's always about them then you'll be that person who only ever meets assholes. We all know the truth: you're the asshole.
So yes, reflect and think about what you could do better, but don't compromise on your principles or try to be a person you're not.
I think you missed the point, he doesn't disagree with your points at all, he's just pointing out that you shouldn't stress yourself out thinking you have to win them all when actually 1 is often all you need.
I’m not sure if the author’s perspective aligns with what I said.
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
I don’t think anyone expects to pass all the interviews. Seriously, who expects that? The right fit of choices is often limited. You need to deeply understand your weaknesses and strengths to even know what the right fit is. People are usually unaware of their own superpowers. Hard work is the only thing that pays off. Luck comes to those who are prepared.
The article has no connection to body positivity at all. It’s about storming through a long series of rejections or failures. And your entire second paragraph could very well be a justification for body positivity itself.
Reminds me of Veritasium's recent video[0] on power law distributions.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k
I also thought about this video. Like VC investiments or book publishers, you dont need all or most to succeed, you need only a few.
"[O]ne outlier can dominate the average"; "We're used to living in this world of normal distributions and you act a certain way, but as soon as you switch to this realm that is governed by a power law, you need to start acting vastly different. It really pays to know what kind of world or what kind of game you are playing."
Related: You should expect to keep getting "no"s until you get a yes. That means, getting a "no" is actually normal, it's not failing.
Each "no" is a signal that you're still trying which puts you above many people whose ego can't handle hearing that word so they settle and turn to bitterness.
A corollary to this, for me at least, has always been: don’t try to fake your way into an opportunity. Be yourself, let people pass on the real you if they want, because you don’t want to land a job where you can’t thrive as yourself. Obviously there’s great privilege in that and sometimes you need to eat shit in order to eat at all, but if you have the option I hope you’re able to wait for the right fit.
On the one hand it is a wholesome article. On the other hand - so much wasted potential of people squeezing out the last bits when competing. Nash equilibria can suck
I read the title and thought it meant that if you just exercise everything else will fall into place.
I should probably still try that.
This St Peterburg paradox. I've just learnt it from Veritasium's last video.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
The article is good, but I am more impressed by how the author has been posting every day since May 12th, 2008.
All it takes is one.
Why are so many people in this thread purposefully misinterpreting the post so they can criticize it? The author obviously doesn't mean you only need one thing per domain to work out in your lifetime, but the present. I.e you don't need two girlfriends at once, even though you might have multiple relationships throughout your life...
Sheesh. HN is grumpy today.
Beautiful piece and reminder.
If you're never done growing, you're never done peaking, nor ever really done trying.
One working out can lead to the next way.
Wishing everyone well who this piece resonated with.
This is also the strategy of groups trying to pass oppressive legislation.
I think author's use of the word "the" is misleading:
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit. [emphasis mine]
You don't need the job that's the right fit. There's more than one. You need any job that fits. (Or that you can make fit you.)
So, if you want to size up the search, let p be the probability that a typical job you apply for will (1) result in you being hired and (2) be a job that fits you. Then the expected number of jobs you must apply to before getting hired to a job that fits you is 1/p. [1]
Say you think p = 5%. Then, on average, you'll need to apply to 20 jobs to land one that fits you.
How many jobs do you need to apply to have a 90% chance of landing one that fits you? If q is the wanted probablity of overall success, then the number of jobs k you must apply to is given by k = log(1 − q) / log(1 − p). So, in this example, k = log(1 − 0.9) / log(1 − 0.05) ≈ 45 applications.
That's a lot of rejections and ill-fitting jobs before landing one that sticks. Which is why it's useful to be persistent and flexible. Being able to make a job fit can dramatically reduce your search.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_binomial_distribution
It's also interesting to consider that we are such adaptative creatures that we will likely settle to a similar level of happiness no matter what the choice.
If you try 2N times to succeed in ventures which each have a 1/N chance of success, as N increases the probability of such as success quickly converges on about 86.5%.
(The limit is 1-e^(-2).)
So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
> So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.
But that perfectly highlights why the "startup gamble" is a great bet for VCs but a horrible bet for most employees. Let's say N is, generously, 50 (i.e. 1 in 50 startups are a resounding success, which seems probably a bit over-optimistic but reasonable). VCs can easily spread investment around to 100 startups, but employees get a few swings at bat at most when it comes to where they work.
For most things in life, you often just don't have that many chances. E.g. most people don't date a hundred people before finding their spouse.
I agree with his sentiments and his examples. But my fear is that on a place like Hacker News, people might not understand the difference between his advice and trying to have a successful startup.
>You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
When I’m applying for a job, I can apply for multiple jobs at once and interview for multiple jobs over a a few weeks. It’s especially easy when I am both interviewing and working remotely. I don’t have to make excuses to leave work during the middle of the day or worse case fly out for an interview.
The same is true for buying a home, I can put bids in for multiple homes - or in my case just have my homes built in 2003 and 2016. I know the world is different now.
>You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
This is one place where of course you can shoot your shot at multiple potential partners and date often. What you don’t want to do is try marriage multiple times if it can be avoided. A bad marriage will wreck every part of your life and a divorce will set you back financially. (Happily remarried for 15 years after a horrible first marriage.)
None of his examples are applicable to starting a business. 9/10 startups fail and even out of those that “succeed” only a small number of those have an outsized return for the founder where they wouldn’t be better off financially working a regular old enterprise dev job for those years let alone getting a job at BigTech.
VCs can make multiple bets at one time and be more assured that they capture the 1/10 startups that succeed than a founder.
There is a huge difference between being able to take multiple chances at once in all of those scenarios and being stuck with the 1/10 choices you make for multiple years.
That’s an aggressive problematic gambler mentality.
No it's not. Gambler's fallacy is "I just flipped tails so heads is more likely now". I read this article as "heads has a 50% chance of coming up so I'll get one eventually" (which is true - law of large numbers).
I think none of those blanket statements here work.
Really it's just odds of finding success vs effort / time spent. And whether that's worth it.
Any of the blanket statements could be true depending on what the exact odds are.
There could be near 0% chance of finding success and it would be better idea to rethink and spend time elsewhere, or yes, there's 10% chance of finding success and it's significant enough that trying 20 times is enough.
If we are talking about e.g. finding a house, if you are not finding any it could very well be that your expectations vs budget is unlikely to find anything and you have to reconsider strategy.
Someone could be repeatedly trying to find work, and thinking it's just a matter of time, but really time would be better spent on improving their strategy, resume, or other means.
These statements to me seem like motivational non-sense which misrepresent how real world works or what the patterns really are like. At best they just give someone a false understanding of how the world works, at worst they make someone spend all their time in the wrong direction.
The difference is that if I apply for 10 jobs at once or put a bid in for 10 houses hoping one will succeed, I’ve lost nothing for trying 10 times.
If I gamble and try 10 times and win once - I have probably lost money.
Even if I interview 10 times and fail 9, I’ve learned something from each interview and I’ve gotten better. That’s also not true from rolling dice.
You lost something when every other person started doing the same thing. Now you have to write or review ten applications instead of one. Now you're going to get paid less because it cost $20k to hire you instead of $2k. Now your company is going to be filled with like-minded people, "hustlers", who do not know how to improve things themselves, just spray and pray until someone mistakenly rewards them.
When the outcome is positive, I see nothing wrong. Especially if you lose basically nothing in trying.
Your time, energy, etc are not nothing. If you think like that, you have already lost and are not making optimal decisions.
The way I read this is that there are many "games" in life (applying for schools, jobs, dating, etc) where the odds of "winning" each instance are not in your favor, but you only need to win once to win overall. If you treat every absence of a positive outcome as a failure, then you're inevitably going to lose hope and give up.
This is in contrast to gambling where you actually do need to win more often than not to win overall.
Seems like a momumental waste of energy being pushed as "hustling". Applying to college should be cooperative between you and the admissions office: asking, are we a good fit? Applying in the hope they mess up and admit you when they're really better off rejecting you is so antisocial.
Admissions are sort-of Pareto distributed, so most people admitted were on the edge of being rejected. Since there is a bit of noise in the process, this is why any one individual applying to 10x as many places of a similar tier will be more likely to get into one. But then when everyone does it, no one is more or less likely to get in except those that are actually cooperating with the admissions office. You're burning down the commons for a fleeting bit of warmth. Might I suggest installing a furnace in your house instead?
All I can say is that the method works specifically because people like you exist. It kind of defeats the purpose if we try to change your mind about this.
So, yes, you are absolutely right.
Lol, yes. If you're a selfish egoist, you probably don't want to convert others to your philosophy.
I think it's possible to punish people who are taking these selfish actions, and I think universities should. Maybe they should make a secret database where they list the people who applied to their university, and subtract off points for every other university they applied to. Or, recruiting agencies can mark down candidates for every other job they are applying to. I don't think they do, and this isn't the startup I want to make or area I want to devote my life to, it just sucks that people are being rewarded for playing negative-sum games.
> Applying in the hope they mess up and admit you when they're really better off rejecting you is so antisocial.
What? That's not what I'm suggesting at all. I just found the post to be a helpful reminder of how to have a healthy mindset towards some uncertainties in life, but it seems like you took away something completely different.
What do you mean by "a healthy mindset"? It isn't healthy for society. It isn't healthy in the world where everyone has this mindset. It isn't healthy to treat your life as a lottery, hoping for a winning ticket instead of creating that ticket yourself. The fact that you consider applications to be uncertainties in life is very telling. You can make them much less uncertain, if you stop thinking of them like a lottery and start doing the things that prove you are valuable to others.
Did you know that USAMO qualifiers have >50% rate of admission to MIT? IMO gold medalists have >80% acceptance rate, and it's only so low because international admissions is limited to 10% of the student body. Life is only a lottery if you have an unhealthy mindset holding you back from improving yourself. Just because university admissions involve a lot of luck at the bottom does not mean you have to limit yourself to a bottom feeder spraying and praying to get in.
Again, I think you've completely misinterpreted the post as well as what I'm trying to say. A "healthy mindset" is simply one that gives you a framework to navigate the world without falling into despair when things don't go your way. Learning to accept that things won't always go your way, and that in some cases they might not go your way the majority of the time, but that they don't have to, is one component of that.
I'm not making any recommendations on how people should actually go about finding wealth, or success, or happiness, or whatever it is you're looking for in life; only how to deal with it when they don't get those things immediately.
Again, I think you don't understand: your "healthy mindset" here is a vice. I do not think it is healthy to drink away your woes. I also do not think it is healthy to cope by treating your life like a big lottery. As I have said several times, the reason I do not consider it healthy is it does not actually help you get what you want, and statistically will leave most people worse off. Finally, from a societal perspective, just like drunk driving hurts everyone around you, this coping behavior also hurts everyone around you.
I would be okay with people spreading beliefs that only hold themselves back, especially if it made them happier. However, I draw the line when they endorse antisocial behavior. I've personally been negatively effected by these hustlers' acions. Almost everyone has, whether or not they can articulate why it seems impossible to get interviewed for a job these days.
I'm not at all advocating for treating life like a lottery. I've had overall a successful career due in large part to my own effort, but the best opportunities have come to me simply by being in the right place at the right time, so it would be arrogant to discount luck entirely. I've also had periods of repeated failure, and if I had counted each and every one of those as a score against my own value then I wouldn't have made it this far. Put more simply, the healthy mindset I have is to do what you can, and accept what you can't. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. Easier said than done.
It seems like you're misinterpreting my words through the lens of your own frustrations right now, so I don't think there's anything else I can say to help you. I just hope you find what you're looking for eventually.
You are not even talking about the article at this point. "All it takes is for one to work out" is TFT. You are instead saying, "be stoic in the things you cannot effect." The latter is much more defensible, and something I endorse. But if you hold the latter, then all it takes is for none to work out. You would accept none, even if you would prefer one, two, or ten. Your comment is a classic motte-and-bailey defense.
There are plenty of gambling scenarios where a single win can offset thousands of losses.
That counter-argument is only valid if you actually had other things to do.
If the alternative to send to yet another university application is to start a new match of CoD then it wasn't a loss.
Interestingly I found my first job through a video game and I never went to uni. I got good at the game (to brag, top 0.1%) and met people in the game who referred me because of the "respect" from being good at that particular game got me. Might seem odd, but a lot of people in the industry played this game and ability to be good at the game did signal something.
I have never spam applied anywhere, and have hyperfocused on very specific positions, putting a lot of prep effort into what I have considered strong matches.
Is it ? In gambling your odds are fixed, but in real life, wouldn't you get better at solving problems with each iteration ?
Depends - are you meaningfully trying to improve or do you keep doing the same thing over and over not getting it?
Indeed. "Just one more roll of the dice and I'll be ahead."
Worse, this guy isn't trying to get a job. He's just trying to get into grad school. Which is no longer a guarantee of a good career, but may be a guarantee of a big debt. Remember that "I did everything right" post on HN a few weeks ago? CS degree from a good school, but nobody wants junior CS people any more.
Taking a break from studying for my interview in two days at a FANG company, I checked Hacker News and this article was at the top. I've been studying for this interview harder than any of the others in the past. I feel well-prepared, but there's always the luck factor. I hope this is a sign that this interview will be the one to work out!
This is beautifully put. I’ve heard it in a different context which was equally profound for me. While searching for the perfect home, after seeing a few, my realtor quipped something to the effect of “there is more than one perfect home for you out there”. I took that to mean that if I have a bunch of choices and they all feel right, then I can go with anyone and be content with the decision. I can tell myself it was the right call at the time.
Why I like the authors interpretation even more is because when the chips are down, you just need the thing to work once (in many contexts) and that might be your golden ticket. Like the one VC that meets you out of a 100, or any of the examples the author wrote.
Thank you for sharing this.
Ome of the situations in the article is very relevant to me right now.
I'm going to keep reminding myself now:
"All it takes is for one to work out.
And that one is all as I need."
This is a great approach! After every opportunity that closed on me another arose, and it always was the better one.
Through these experiences I totally agree, and try to apply it to life, but it's hard, even knowing that it's true. How cool is it for every college, person, job offer, scholarship to want you?
Even though we're looking just for "the one" it's very hard for me to mitigate the feeling of getting rejected, even knowing it was not "the one". Rejection generally hurts, when you care about the goal
Wow, I really dislike this framing of life as a lottery. Yes, people can get lucky. You could win the lottery. Statistically, someone else will hold the winning ticket, every time. It's even worse, because graduate school admissions and startup success are correlated between attempts. If you bring a shotgun but you're not even aiming at the target, you're never going to hit it.
Exactly correct. As a YouTuber, all it takes is one YouTube Short to go viral for me, and I'll have hundreds of thousands of subscribers overnight. I haven't had anything go seriously viral, but my biggest Shorts have resulted in huge subscriber jumps. The best advice I ever received was to consistently post for years on end. If you have high-quality content, one of those Shorts is almost certain to eventually hit the big leagues.
When it does, your life will change in an instant.
"Don't turn your life into a lottery" - Peter Thiel
-says the guy that won the lottery
True. He def hit the jackpot with seed round for Facebook lol
I've seen plenty of small channels having a one time hit that didn't really change anything in the long run
I thought HN is supposed to upvote articles that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Does this article gratify intellectual curiosity? I don't understand why these shallow feel-good articles devoid of any intellectual curiosity always get upvoted to the top! There are so many high effort, substantive articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest that nobody upvotes!
because even when it isn't why people come here, and if there was too much of it you may be right - a message which brings up a smile or warm feeling is enough for people to be thankfull
and that is a good thing
Obviously the article is voted to the top. So the the lurkers at /newest and the general HN audience must like this. Still I wish though that upvoters stuck to the HN guidelines of upvoting stuff that really gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, not just some feel-good piece. There is no shortage of other places where I can find feel-good articles. I want HN to stick to HN guidelines.
This is all the more sad for me because among all the spam, many high effort articles get posted to /newest but many don't get the upvotes. These shallow, feel-good articles always get the upvotes. I guess it takes more time to read and appreciate a high effort article. So I understand why this happens. But ...
The blog post is simple but it was enough of a good prompt to spark an interesting discussion. Sometimes the comments expand the depth of an idea and that's where the meat of curiosity thrives.
I submit articles personally that I think will start interesting conversations. I didn’t submit this one. But I suspected it would go in the direction of trying to start a company - which it did. That is entirely on brand for a site run by a VC company.
Mission accomplished.
How many great opportunities are passed up by people waiting for the 'perfect' one to come along?
Job offers passed on because it wasn't the perfect fit. Marriage chances missed because the perfect soul mate must still be around the corner. Good schools rejected because it wasn't their dream school.
Luck often accompanies those willing to accept less than perfect in many cases.
This is also the philosophy espoused by Taleb. You want that job that involves tinkering, playing, and an option to select winners.
On a much less optimistic dark humor note, this is the same argument in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies about a superintelligent AI emerging and being a threat to humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
I’ve considered some form of grad school a few times, but I always came to the conclusion there just wasn’t enough value in it for a software engineer like me. I don’t plan on teaching, and I’m not really interested in the “science” of computer science so much as the practice of it. Anyone able to validate or challenge my assumptions here?
If you don't want to do any of the science part of computer science then this route may not be one for you to consider. However, if we assume that AI is going to be with us in 5 years, and that it would take you 5 years to get a PhD in an AI-related area you do find interesting, and furthermore that demand for talent with a PhD in that area has gone up, or stayed constant vs demand for general software development talent, then, based on that pile of "if"s, while a $100 million job offer from Meta may not exist in 5 years, it is still something to consider.
The only thing to add here is the value of the network you will build. It’s very easy for swes to forget that people connecting to people is how things happen. Just be careful around cost. Speaking from experience, having student loan debt changes the range of your vision.
I read this as: all you have to do is work out.
Right? I thought the article was going to be about how constructive having even a simple daily workout can be for mental health.
After reading the article, I like my version better.
Sort of related - 10k pushups and other silly exercise quests that changed my life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456188
Write it, then, and post it up here!
That's what it says.
While it’s true that all we need is one to work out, in general we strive to be in positions where we have multiple options, not just hinging everything on one passing chance. Life is less stressful that way, and that’s why people today feel like they are under so much pressure and have little choice over how their lives unfold.
Reminds me of AlphaGo
It didn't try to maximise by how much it won, but just that it won. Apparently it changed the meta for human pkayers.
If you have the time for it, the movie/doc is worth watching https://youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
Purely poetic advice. If the local economy collapses, you will very much want to move. There's still a 50% chance the first spouse doesn't hold up until death. There are many schools that give out degrees that aren't worth a wooden frame in today's job market.
And its always the last one you try. Just like every lost item is found in the last place you look :-)
Needed to read this. 20 years building software for other people, finally launched my own thing a few weeks ago. Most days feel like nothing is working. But you only need one thing to click.
Personally, I do believe and still on the perpetual aim for that “You have to be right just once.” For me, it is not about the “right one(s).” My philosophy is that I should be able to “Walk Out” from situations, deals, and options that I picked and be ready for the next.
I wrote about Walking Out,[1] but more from a content/digital life perspective. I do follow similar thinking with life situations too.
I’m neither complaining nor comparing, but hey, life dealt a bad enough hand early on. Mother left us when the last of our siblings (sister) was barely 6 months old, and father was never present. My brothers and I survived by working odd jobs, stealing vegetables from neighbors, and running errands for almost everyone in the neighborhood. My brother worked repairing bicycles, cleaning trucks, and giving up studies so I could study. I started teaching the neighbors’ kids in my 5th grade and paid through school, then worked computer stuff to pay for college, and also begged a lot of relatives to supplement for food, books, etc. I know what actual starvation meant. It was only around my 15th year I learnt that winters can actually be warm when I had a sleep-over at my friend’s place where they had warm blankets that was thick enough.
So, my belief is that things won’t work out. Can I Walk Out? Well, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
Way later in life, I realized the neighbors knew about our night crawls. That was why they started giving us their vegetable garden harvest, and the “we have some extra cooking oil.”
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
You mean, the first one to say yes. Tbh seems more like first to say yes, not first to be fit and say yes.
> You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home.
Same here. Is easy to find one to say yes. Hard to be “feels like home” && say yes.
> You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
“The one” is hard.
>You don’t need ten universities to say yes. You just need the one that opens the right door.
Same. What even means “the right door”? How can you even know before you got in?
I think it’s a bad analogy. At least frame it a more realistic: your only need one job to say yes. Might not be the right job but it’s a job. Same for all other.
It also takes just one big mistake to really make things tougher…
This is also vividly demonstrated by life via evolution through natural selection.
Life had to spark only once, leading to the subsequent explosion in variety and complexity.
A (possible) restatement of the oft quoted "They have to be lucky all the time, we only have to be lucky once" (albeit only the second half)
Was living in a small city for a while during the pandemic. Commented to parent that dating scene wasn’t going to be good and I needed to move to a bigger city. They answered “all you need is to meet one person”.
I did. Met on an app, turned out they lived round the corner from me, we are now married. She is a _very_ unusual person (has to be to work with me) and you wouldn’t expect her to be in a small city, but due to particular life circumstances she had just moved there temporarily.
Strangest downvotes I ever received.
My dumb ass read it as "all it takes is that you workout", just with the more fancy pronoun 'one'
At-bats have always been the name of the game. That's why if you're going to do something risky make sure you build the safety net
At some point you don't need "the one that gives you joy". You need the one that pays the bills and feeds the family
The problem is that the opportunity you need might be a 1 in 100 lifetimes opportunity...
These days once in a lifetime opportunities are getting increasingly rare... This is something that the lucky few do not understand because they may pass up on once-in-100-lifetimes opportunities just about every single day. The asymmetry of opportunities is massive.
Our system is not a level playing field.
No system in the history of humanity has wasted as much human potential as our current system. Opportunities are completely monopolized.
You don't need to buy a lottery ticket every day, you just need to buy one on the day you get the winning ticket.
Thanks for the tip buddy!
Yep, heard so many no’s while building my startup. They mean nothing to me now because I got a few yes’s when it mattered.
I basically repeated the same thing to my wife when I was transitioning into software engineering. It’s so true!
When I saw the title, I thought it was going to be about exercise :-P
I'm confused. This just seems like feel-good bullshit advice that only works for people in extremely good circumstances.
There's a false equivalence between -
“All it takes is for one to work out.”
and the following:
- "You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit."
- "You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home. "
The latter assumes that _every_ attempt you make has a chance at being "the right fit", "the one that feels like home". That is not the way things works for 99% of us.
Unless you interpret 'working out' as being 'the right fit', then it comes together pretty nicely
Just try to enjoy your life. "The one" is a mindset of seeking for a "release". Frankly, this does not sound healthy and I guess there are bigger underlying problems.
Similar to shots on goal concept. Sometimes more tries is the answer
The corollary to this is "keep walking"... As my mom always tells me.
If you are going through hell etc.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this wasn’t about exercising.
I think it would be better if it were about exercising; it's more useful advise that way.
So, all it takes is for you to work out: You may not get into that grad school / that job, but you'll be healthier and you'll feel less depressed. In fact, even if you're in grad school, it's pretty good advice for coping avoiding burnout, coping with impostor syndrome etc.
Maybe you need only one. I need universal adoration! Everyone must love me!
I thought it was about exercising. (which also helps with stress)
This is what I keep telling my son even though he is still a bit too young:
Here in Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, all you need is to try hard and get lucky once.
Did anyone else take this as “all it takes is for one to exercise” or am I the only one lol
I miss the days of legit journalism where we had these people called "editors" which catch these types of issues before publication
Another saying i repeat to myself, which if gotten from a friend.
You have already lost, you can only win.
Except "work out" is not and state but a process. You don't get a person who loves you back and expect it to last a lifetime be default.
Same about university or house, or... anything really.
Great article and a timely reminder for many :)
Applicable not just for grad school applications, but also to job apps, startups, and relationships.
Hang in there y'all, all it takes is for one to work out. Keep working hard, kings & queens.
DOOM
Wolfenstein was pretty successful already. commander Keen did okay.
all I need is one SaaS to work out, I've built five of them this year, the fifth one is the one though, I promise.
Fuck yeah, man. That's great. Thank you for saying that
Needed this today. Apparently the HN hive mind agreed.
All it takes, is for one to work out.
"Is this where you stop?"
That may be true, but it's also a trap: You can say exactly the same thing to someone at a casino with their last £50 at five in the morning. Sometimes, the advice that people give you, if they care about you, is that the smart thing to do is to walk away from a rough game - and if you don't, the end can be very bad indeed. You are a variable over the search space, and the way that you interact with it alters the results that you will get as applied to your life:
Making this specific, I used to work in employment advice. As one of the things here is a job search, I'll touch on that one: There are people who have been applying for jobs for decades. I've met many people who haven't been able to get a job in north of twenty years. It's obvious that what they're doing will never work out for them. There may be one job in the world out there that will take them, but just doing a naive search will - in all probability - never locate for them that job. The world is too large and they don't have the time to search even a single percentage of it. What they need to do is to look at all the reasons they're not getting a job and prioritise addressing those:
- Do they have all the qualifications and certificates they need for their target industry? - Do they have recent relevant experience? - Do they have a good CV? - Do they have a decent cover letter? - Do they have a good interview?
Now, that's not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.
The other way in which it's a bad piece of advice is that people aren't machines. When you've spent a great deal of time gambling and losing then the tendency is for people to seek bigger payoffs at higher comparative risks and/or lower comparative chances of success. The tendency is for people to be less likely to do the things, e.g. volunteering, that will improve their odds as their tally of losses increases.
Down thread, raw_anon_1111 posits the position that you've lost nothing by trying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46091837 - in my experience this is not the case.
People lose time in making the attempts, they lose energy (which is perhaps more important than time,) and they lose sight of other options - which game they're playing, why they're playing it, how they're playing it. It will, in all probability, not work out within their lifetimes - and the reason that it won't work out is that following this sort of strategy has made them the sort of person for whom it is unlikely to do so. Whilst their friends went and volunteered, and took concrete steps, they just kept trying that same strategy on the assumption that at least one was out there for them that met their requirements. And there just wasn't. Not in that timespan.
Now, I'm not saying just give up and never try. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. But if you've been trying to make something work out - as a rule of thumb - for six months say, and you're not seeing concrete steps towards success - you should re-examine your fundamental assumptions. Preferably, if it's something high-stakes, with the assistance of a competent third party that you trust. Because maybe you're the problem, and maybe there's something you can do about it. And you'd best find that out now rather than spending 20 years on some warmly meant advice that perhaps isn't going to work out for you.
I have been calling out specifically the difference between things you can try in parallel with little to know negative consequences - like applying for multiple jobs, going on multiple interviews, putting bids in for multiple houses - and winning one, and things that you have to do sequentially that cost time - like starting a business and failing multiple times that take 3-5 years each, cost real money and there are opportunity cost.
In the short run, I'd mostly agree with you. Something being parallelisable at a low cost lets you do more of it in a short space of time, and probably lends itself to what should be an earlier decision as to whether to reexamine your approach. You're going to have a lot more information earlier - all else being equal.
In the mid to long run, however, the costs mount up - however small they may start off as. You can make, say, 20 job applications a day - (not an uncommon thing to have people do if they were on mandated provision) - have a couple of hundred open in a few weeks and get nothing back. That takes something out of people. People will still spend time from finding and making those applications, energy, motivation, an awareness of the wider context in which their problem's structured....
There's a human component to the problem which generates opportunity costs for things that don't seem to have any. Like yes, technically, you can put 20 job applications in a day and then go and volunteer. But it's the rare person who's actually going to have the energy, motivation and awareness to do that when they're going hard on a broad search strategy.
From an investor perspective yeah if you put $200k into a 20 different business, 19 can fail but that one that gives you back 50x your investment is a massive payoff.
Of course this is of little solace to the 19 other "entrepeneurs" you funded, who wind up with zero for busting their butt for the gamble
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