This is definitively anecdotal, though I've been at / through approximately 5 startups across 12 years, and looking back, I believe each end everyone one (except for one) was definitely helped / started by a founder or set of founders who didn't have to worry about whether they went belly up or not due to family wealth. Hell, I still know some that I've consulted for that have lived in the bay area for the past 8 years without a product that makes any money, no vc funding, and were just out of their masters 8 years ago.

Clearly looking back, nearly every founder I've worked for came from a family with $$$. Even currently, at least one of my co-ceos just up and left their 2 million dollar menlo park house and went to live in their parents vacation home in monterey right when covid began.

Taking risks becomes extremely easy when you have a large family wealth backed safety net propping you up along the way. This happens way more often than people realize, and often the founder(s) will definitely not talk about this at all / downplay it if it is brought up.

The privilege is real.

I personally also don't think it is unfair if kids of rich parents inherit their money (or their support). After all, being able to take care of one's children is a major motivation of many people for trying to make money.

It's also well known that money is an important factor in mate choice for women.

Even without money, biology would be at work and people would be striving to find attractive mates to conceive "fit" children.

You could then also say those "fit" children are "privileged" compared to "less fit" children.

--

Anyway, as your own anecdotes highlight, if you are not rich, find another way, for example a rich person who gives you money.

I believe, from experience seeing it, many founders who succeed will quote literally everything but their background, upbringing, and privilege as a factor, even though the fact that they had little to worry about while building their empire with respect to you know, the things everyone else has to care about on a daily basis (bills, debt, what happens if I fail) is an extremely large factor.

The barrier to entry of them taking a risk is so much lower that it is (in my opinion) directly correlated to their success at the end of the day.

Anyway, that's all. Less about fairness, and more about wish this was really highlighted more.

It's a shame, because I think it used to mean exactly the opposite, having a privilege was an honor. Is the phrase "it was a privilege to have known you" still being used?

I have intimate knowledge with writers, specifically offspring of well known writers who do their best to hide this fact, yet will still use their parents agent. And yes, it is unfair for them to believe they are on equal footing with any other writer.

That doesn't mean they don't try hard, but they do have benefits built into their life that others don't.

If you want to trailblaze without being perceived as someone of privilege getting there then you should take paths that align with that, and not ones that don't.

I used to think about this, "only people with relations can make it". When I got older I realized that if you care about some subject, you will probably end up making relevant connections on the way.

And I also think this way of thinking about privilege is self-defeating. If you don't have "privilege X", find another way.

Some writers now got rich without ever having an agent, self-publishing.

I'm sure people will find some other alleged privilege they had, which allowed them to do that. That's not the point.

If you are dead poor and have no connections whatsoever, you have the "privilege" to write authentically about being poor.

It's an ugly truth of life that I've come to accept: the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.

Another tried and proven way is to marry somebody who is rich. Mostly just an option for women, though.

Marrying into money is an option for some, but you have to make a big emotional sacrifice (at least in Western culture) if you opt for going by wallet instead of going by heart. It's doable, but GP's point here is that a rich person doesn't have to make that choice.

If you Google, you should find a lot of articles about it, as it is an important sociological issue. Now that more women are having a career, in fact, more women than men are having an academic career, it is becoming difficult for women to find adequate men.

Also women marrying up was historically the MOST important mechanism of social mobility (people moving up in status/wealth). Too bad that feminism does not allow it anymore, as any man who marries a less wealthy women is considered to be "abusing his power".

The other claim, women being attracted to men with more money, I am less sure about. I am sure you can find studies analyzing data from dating platforms yielding that result, but I don't know how well they generalize to dating in general.

Edit: perhaps a starting point, but in general, Google should be able to help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

"A ball player's got to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.

- Joe Dimaggio

I don’t expect the hungriest kids to have any chance in most pro sports unless they’re above average, at least in size for the major US sports.

[1] YC publishes stats on each class, but here's an umbrella stat that should cheer us all up: in the last 5 years alone, around 1,000 YC founders were female, Black or Latinx (https://www.reuters.com/article/venture-capital-y-combinator...)

If anything those coming from backgrounds I didn't list should try to be as involved as possible with startups. Thanks for the alternative take, but nothing stated was meant to deter as much as inform.

We also shouldn't erase potential truths for lack of crowdsourced data. We as a tech community have a large desire to ask for the source, which is great, but double edged.

Relaying information of this sort that I and others brought up is important on the basis of more eyes on the potential problem and looking into the data than not.

Everyone on HN knows that the startup life is, in many ways, a lottery. But that doesn't mean it's not still one of the most reliable ways of exercising self-determination, working on something you're truly passionate about, taking full responsibility for your fate, and becoming financially independent (if not outright wealthy). Which is why most of us do it.

And, yeah, failing sucks, but saying "don't forget you'll most likely fail!" is just not particularly insightful in this kind of context. We already know that.

There's just no way this is true. For people with the skills needed by SV startups, working at one of the startups is almost certainly financially worse than using those skills at a large company.

Virtually all self-made millionaires+ started companies[1]. There's really no other way to get there.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2019/10/02/self-...

So sure, it’s possible to become a billionaire by writing books just look at J.K. Rawling. Hell someone got 10,000 bitcoins for the price of 2 pizza, which in theory are worth 366,790,000$ today. In the end the upside of being the founder isn’t worth much on day one. It might be worth something down the line, but it’s critical to have a fallback option.

Which is why I've been mentioning "risks" in just about every post I've made. Which is why a big part of OP is how taxing and difficult it's been. Why is why we keep talking about how 9/10 businesses fail. There's no free lunch.

But my original point was that we already know this. So it's not particularly insightful to point it out on a forum almost exclusively dedicated to people working on startups.

We know this, yadda yadda "survivorship bias." It's just boring to have the same people making the same points about every startup that made it. It's like the old "correlation does not equal causation" trope you see repeated over and over again when someone links any dataset. We get it.

Again, my point is that this is not insightful -- and you've yet to demonstrate otherwise.

It’s only when your benchmark is becoming a billionaire that it starts to look like the best option.

I feel like I argue this ad nauseum here on HN. No, being engineer #3489 won't ever make you financially "independent" (and by that, I mean having FU money). Financial comfort is something else entirely. Making 100-200k (even including stock bonuses) somewhere like SF/NY where rent for a 1 bed 1 bath is like 3k (and houses/condos start at $1 million) will never have the same upside as starting your own company. Let's ignore for now the very real chance of getting laid off, or otherwise fired in favor of a younger engineer that gets paid less than you do (when you hit your 40s).

But again, financial independence is just one aspect of "winning" at a startup. Everyone conveniently ignores doing your own thing, freedom, self-reliance, self-determination, etc. -- these are non-existent at BigCorp (where you're treated, at best, like a cog). I personally value freedom much more than I do money -- which is why I accept the risks of every few years throwing my hat in the ring and seeing what comes of idea X or Y.

Plenty of engineers working at FAANG and investing in index funds have enough money to retire comfortably in their 30s. That’s what the GP means by financial independence, I believe.

Also “senior” engineers (>5 years of experience) at these companies make a lot more than 200k a year.

No they don't, look up the numbers. Average salary on most websites is around 180k. Principal engineers start making north of 300k (at FAANG, which is already a subset of a subset) but it's very difficult to snag one of those.

I like the FIRE movement, but ironically, I think it's pretty analogous to doing your own startup. Obviously, it's less risk (but also less upside).

I think you're out of touch with modern TC. There are many engineers at FAANG pulling past 300k/yr - many going past 400k/yr. One management track + one senior engineer can clear $1mil/yr. I know plenty of people in the valley who do this reliably... https://www.levels.fyi/2020/ - just check out what a senior engineer can make...

1) Average comp for a senior (not principal) engineer at FAANG is 350-400k, not 200k.

2) It's much easier to get a job at FAANG and get promoted to senior (or get a job elsewhere and hop to FAANG later) than it is to start a comparably successful startup. Google alone employs 30k+ engineers, most of them in the US, which means they employee ~1% of the software engineers in the country. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that 8-10% of all SWEs in the US work for a company where standard career progression will get them to that level of comp in 10 years or less.

3) Starting and growing a startup to the point where it can provide an exit event that translates to financial independence (in a comparable time frame) is much harder than getting a job at one of those tech companies, and much less likely to succeed.

4) You don't need to earn 350k/yr to become financially independent much earlier than the typical retirement age, even if you live in the Bay and suffer with the rent. You need to save 25x your future annual outlay. This is trivially achievable by age 50 with most work/life/family configurations that include at least one software engineer (single earners, 2-income couples, 1-income couples w/1-stay-at-home, etc) earning half that (i.e. your 180k), if you don't insist on retiring as a property owner in the single most expensive city in the US. If you are in FAANG/comparable, getting there by 40 is a no-brainer if you aren't really awful at managing your money. A couple working at FAANG can easily manage by 35. This isn't "eat rice and beans, then retire in a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere" independence, either, this is "hit 5m+ net worth". 5m is "fuck you" money by any reasonable metric.

Accounting for taxes ruins it a bit, but once the jackpot gets high enough it's dumb not to buy a ticket.

Consider your personal utility function, at 70 what odds would you need to play double or nothing with your entire life’s savings. If it takes more than 50.1:49.9 odds then you like most people don’t have a linear view of money.

This is a complete fabrication. I never said that, directly or indirectly. In fact, I've said multiple times in this thread that 9/10 startups fail and that startup life is a "lottery" but people still choose to do it for reasons X, Y, or Z.

On that note, I do think there's a flaw in the logic or premises (or unstated assumptions -- maybe "millionaire" is code for some larger quantity of wealth) somewhere. A decade in FAANG with conservative spending habits will easily create a millionaire with a near 100% success rate, and it would be surprising if starting a company would have better odds than that.

Looking at the potential upside is disastrous without looking at the downside. That's what the '00 tech bubble was -- we're prone to HUGE biases and it is important to have constant reminders to bring us back to reality.

The founders who have succeeded are known to be _irrationally_ optimistic, literally irrational. This means, statistically, it's a poor choice to do what they did. It means, in some sense of the word, they got lucky. Many founders publicly acknowledge this -- luck was a huge factor.

If you want money, being a founder _might_ get you there, but odds are, it won't.

Being a founder makes the most sense when you're obsessed with solving a problem and the money is a perk, not a motivator.

Transparency: ex-founder of Series B company

The article you linked makes no sense related to your claim. Unless you're saying that millionaires+ (whatever the + means) don't exist outside of Forbes.

> There's really no other way to get there

Joining a startup as an early member? Working in finance or computer science or medicine with ridiculous salaries?

Here's a link[1] with thousands of jobs with an average income higher than $100k. If you have that kind of income, you can become a millionaire.

> QOL of working on what you want, commanding your own ship, being financially independent, etc.

How about the QOL of not knowing for a long time whether you'll succeed or fail? Or having to deal with investors, marketing, managing people, aka everything that you probably don't want to be working with? Not commanding your own ship because most of it is built with other people's money?

If you're talking QOL, I don't see how playing the lottery with your future (in your own words) is better than having a high-income job, then FIRE in your 30ies.

[1] https://www1.salary.com/Six-Figure-Income-Salaries.html?page...

This is kind of silly to bring up. Obviously people starting a company are okay with managing people and dealing with investors (or if not, being bootstrapped). You're saying "being an elite athlete sucks because you have to deal with working out and eating healthy" like.. yeah, you kind of signed up for that. You can't be an NFL player and eat donuts all day.

> FIRE in your 30ies.

This is ironically very similar to doing a startup (but with less risk, and a lower upside). Are you forgetting that investing didn't go so well for people in 2008? I actually like the FIRE movement.

I must have dreamed all the posts and comments about people learning that they were actually not made for being a founder, that marketing is more important than what they like doing (programming), and that the stress of creating a company is higher than they thought.

It's nice that you found your path in life, and I have nothing against that path being creating a company. I just don't see what's your goal by repeating that everyone who doesn't agree with you is a "survivorship bias naysayer". Self-reassurance you made the right choice?

If it fails you can almost certainly go back to working at a big company and heck even try again later on in life.

Now that startups tend to stay private so long, the value of employee equity has absolutely tanked.

but then the people work with us tell us how important our work is to them / the community and it encourages us to push through... it's kind of bittersweet

Cool, you're a cynic. Yes, as we all know, most startups fail and the US healthcare system sucks. Anything else to add?

You're attacking a strawman here. My point was merely that cynicism (which your post conveyed in spades), much like solipsism, is an unproductive dead-end. Feel free to make your case, but I'm fairly confident I'm correct.

[^1]: "an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest; skepticism."

2013: Their reddit, digg, forum posts went nowhere, their hackernews post hit

2021: Their reddit, twitter, forum posts went nowhere, and neither did their hackernews

It's sort of like a failure resume, which is certainly an interesting exercise.

https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/document/download/bed2706fd...

OP had a three year old daughter with a life-threatening medical condition, so I'm not sure what exactly you're talking about.

But I think the thanks here is for the community that was willing to give a new product a try, provide feedback, and help the founders build momentum towards what it ultimately became — especially when it was clear there was no traction on other sites. I think that's something to be thankful for, and shows that HN can be different from other communities in meaningful ways.

TL;DR -- don't run out of money.

This really isn't true. The average age of a successful entrepreneur is 45.

>I think this is why a lot of crazy big startups come from younger people,

"crazy big startups"

Of course 9/10 founders are going to fail, some people have more privilege to take risks, and people with families have to take measured risks.

What's the point? Should people not try, keep crying about it, keep complaining that it's easy to say this when you have privilege, keep looking at the negative side? We all recognize life's a lottery and the odds are stacked in favor of some and not others. So?

At least most people in tech have the skills to fall back on a career if their company fails. Needless caution advice coated in a cynical tone just creates negativity around the whole topic.

Can't we just celebrate that the founder of Webflow managed to rescue his company from the brink of fail (even if it was dumb luck - it wasn't) and has built a life for himself? This is the stuff that inspires human beings and makes everyone feel like they could do it too. Clouding it in _oh but what if you're in the other 9 out of 10 camp_ is just you know .. pointless.

It's fine to say, hey make yourself comfortable first, play small bets and free yourself from complete ruin before you go bet the farm, but, yolo so you do you. But no need to rain on the parade of the person who has crossed over to the other side.

By educating me about the risk, you haven't accomplished anything. If you have ideas for how I can play the odds better and improve my success rate, I'm all ears. It's better to say look to each side of the road when you cross vs you're gonna die if you're not careful.

My stakes are much, much smaller, so maybe this experience is very particular to me, but I'm fortunate to have bootstrapped a growing SaaS business that is now closing in on USD$2000 MRR. Before this, I have a trail of hair-brained failures.

The sense of accomplishment hasn't changed with the (modest) business success. I've felt accomplished the first day I started trying and failing. This is just our nature. Seeing material success from it only icing on the cake.

At the same time, I read this particular post as much less about "look how hard I hustled and because of that I'm a winner" and much more about gratitude towards the HN community and the appreciating the luck that enabled them to be one of the rare winners. It's more "even though we hustled we were still on track to lose until we got lucky and supported from others." I think that's an excellent sentiment to share.

Tell yourself that it was because they were given such and such a "privilege", or had such and such an easier thing, and you had a hard thing, and therefore it never could have ever been you, and therefore feel better at your own failed dreams. Or tell yourself that you are smart, and they are dumb and simply lucky, because most fail. Either way, find a way to spin it so you are right and they wrong, and definitely don't actually reflect on how you could get some of what they have, nor improve yourself in any way. Remind yourself instead why their success is not actually so good, or so special, and especially remember to tell yourself that it's not and it's never your fault if you don't succeed. Align with your true nature and surrender to the inevitability of your powerlessness. This is right, for you, oh sheep. This is your good path. Don't fall into the trap of hoping, or idolizing, or being inspired. Never dream. Remember to always be critical and find fault with another's success, in order to protect yourself. This is your way. Go forth and just be.

Personally, my plan is to go back to Europe if I want to launch an American startup because there is no way I would do this without a good health insurance and good social safety nets.

Interestingly, we see much more startups in the US even though the downsides of creating your startup in the US are insane. I guess we are really optimistic individuals (or start up founders tend to be crazy individuals).