All it takes is for one to work out
(alearningaday.blog)806 points by herbertl 4 days ago
806 points by herbertl 4 days ago
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”.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
If you don’t have a fall back, you have no choice but to make it work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
not necessarily how inherently good you are
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.
Gates, Bezos, Buffet, Musk all had enough hunger to beat out literally everyone else
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
My lucky break occurred many years before the pandemic, but after the original dotcom boom. Companies were neither hiring nor firing like crazy.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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 :)
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."
Agreed. It’s not what I’d call a “fulfilling” process, though.
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.
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’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.
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."
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.
This St Peterburg paradox. I've just learnt it from Veritasium's last video.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.