Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?
There is a parable I can't remember. The gist is as follows.
A man/woman has a nice life, a cheap apartment in an okay neighbourhood. Their 9-5 job isn't particularly exciting or well-paid; however, at the weekend, it allows them to enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.
A stranger approaches them and says they make a much better life for themselves. He tells them they just need to get a cheap apartment in a sketchy neighbourhood, work all waking hours of the day, and give up any fun until they make it. They may fail five times until they succeed and may be declared bankrupt.
After listening, they ask what their life looks like after they make it. He answers it allows them to have an okay apartment in a more expensive neighbourhood, and they can enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.
They smile at the stranger, and say "But I already have most of this right now". The stranger walks off wearily.
Indeed. I’m not an entrepreneur or anything but liken it a bit to having a good initial poker hand - you can win with one good card but it is helpful and gives one more options to have two good cards.
So in the context of bootstrapping a company it’s helpful to have a legit fallback (way to suck it up and find an OK job) when things don’t pan out.
Edit: maybe this is obvious for CS/software folks but the extracurricular work I’m involved with is not exactly tech related, though my day job is coding
I'm never sure what to do with this class of comment - it reminds me of guys who say they can't get a girlfriend because they're 5'8".
(Also, you forgot people whose parents are able-but-unwilling. This also sometimes makes some things harder than they would be, compared to, say, being given fistfulls of cash each weekend by your rich parents who have a sofa AND a bed.)
> Having a strong support group in your life is probably one of the most important things to success.
This. “It's not what you know its who you know.” Though often the people who give that advice privately are the most invested in maintaining the illusion of meritocracy publicly.
This works a lot better if you have parents that live in Palo Alto or SF compared to Tulsa, OK.
To the original post, I generally agree. There are some fundamental lessons about business you can learn, and if you follow them, have a better chance of success. But the magnitude of that success largely comes down to luck. There's plenty of thought leaders out there that just happened to join the right company at the right time. Much of their success is "beta" rather than "alpha", but they are treated like they have unique insight to drive amazing outcomes.
right, also we don't like hearing stories about all the entrepreneurs who failed to find success, and slipped into impoverished obscurity. How many kids are sitting in the back seat of the car, lamenting "I could have been a contender" you know? You don't hang out with the ones who failed to keep their heads above water, because you're afraid they're going to drown you too.
Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.
"But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."
This was basically Memnoch The Devil's [0] argument against the legitimacy of Jesus Christ's sacrifice - it didn't count, because he did it with full knowledge of his own immortality. Through crucifixion he suffered and died, but he never faced the existential dread that plagues humankind, and therefore giving up his own life was an inauthentic act.
It's more that he came from such wealth that his family could acquire a nontrivial share in an emerald mine on what amounted to a whim.
> Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?
> "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."
If Wikipedia or Snopes are to be believed on the matter (and I really don’t know anymore), this is way overblown. Mines (emerald, not diamond btw) are cheaper than you think. If my dad buys half of a tiny mine in his retirement I’ll start walking around claiming I’m from a mine owning family!
The story of how he even got to own the mine sounds pretty wild:
“According to the story, in the mid-1980s, Errol and a copilot landed their plane near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, where "a group of Italians" offered them 80,000 pounds in British currency in order to buy the plane.
Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?
"I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."”
It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.
> It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.
Just to clarify for anyone else wondering, that’s 400,000USD inflation adjusted for 2021. Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.
To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties. If they bought in an expensive area, they likely would have only been able to afford 4 or 5.
There are lots of people from wealthy backgrounds who'll slum it for a while. There's not usually a reason to doubt that. The thing to keep in mind is that voluntary/temporary poverty is very different from poverty you can't get out of with an embarrassing phone call.
I lived in relative poverty for a while when doing my first business, and while my parents were not particularly wealthy, knowing they provided an escape hatch took a lot of pressure off (living somewhere with a highly functional welfare system provided additional comfort). Things could have crashed and burned at any time, and I'd likely have been better off financially.
