I hear this argument a lot. Why would lifestyles become more expensive if you become an exec but not a successful entrepreneur? Successful entrepreneurs like fancy, nice things too.
Because coming up with salary/living expenses for themselves is not the definition of entrepreneur. The successful ones do it, but there are plenty of not-yet-successful entrepreneurs.
This entire comment is predicated on the assumption that getting rich is the underlying reason entrepreneurs build businesses. I disagree with this assumption.
You assume most people/entrepreneurs want to be rich and have a lifestyle.
And it sounds like your view of the process cones from only examining high profile winners. It's like basing your opinion of music or sports as a career based on the highly improbable success of the musicians and athletes you've heard of.
I imagine that there are some people, especially in finance, who do what they do purely for money and lifestyle, but the "entrepreneurs" I admire would do what they do for free.
I think the advice that the whole reason to be an entrepreneur is to become wealthy as opposed to having some sort of drive or care about your product or service is totally sound. i mean who doesn't want to be super rich? but i guess it's also stupid because if all you care about is being rich there are plenty of grinds you can do to get there. But i guess you have to be prestigious.
also caviar comes in a tube and people put it on crackers. i would prefer to eat other stuff.
I agree that both positions are ridiculous. I also want to add that all businesses are "lifestyle businesses." But it's how you define your lifestyle that makes the difference. I'd rather run a small shop that allows me to pay myself to build things, hack software, play with new technologies, and sleep in. OTOH, someone else might want to fly all around the country, sit in meeting after meeting, get on the cover of Forbes, and have fancy dinners every night.
To each his own, but I'd much rather run a business that enables the former than necessitates the latter.
But that raises a question, is it possible to take a business to scale without sacrificing the things you loved to do yourself? Derek Sivers is one example--he structured CDBaby so he could keep writing code most of the time and sold it when the business wasn't fun for him anymore. Any other examples?
Being an entrepreneur is really hard work. Yeah you can get rich, sometimes very quickly, but a lot of people just don't want to work 5-10x as hard for 0.5-100x the pay.
Going to go out on a limb and say it's because working for others doesn't make you rich. Extraverts get more jobs but does that really translate into wealth? Entrepreneurship creates far more wealth.
I feel this. This is my viewpoint as someone who cannot realistically afford an "entrepreneurial" lifestyle. Similarly, I'd rather not see my savings dwindle every month rather than grow. I feel that concern only goes away when you are practically-speaking rich or FIRE.
When I see people talking about entrepreneurship on HN or quitting their X job to do Y project, I feel no different than it being the "minimalist lifestyle" of tech. All this talk about how it's freeing you of all these things that tie you down and what not but it's only "freeing" because you're rich AF.
This article read like: "I'm a rich dude who worked at Big X and went to an Ivy League university. Fuck being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I live in one of the most expensive and desirable cities in the world. I'm gonna do whatever I want with my ridiculously large savings and I hope to make even more money with whatever I come up with! I'll probably go back to another FAANG if this doesn't pan out in a year and say I did some seriously cool stuff on my resume. I'll get an even bigger package. Wooooo!"
It may be a myth upon people who are not entrepreneurs but I'm pretty certain money is not what drives entrepreneurs rather being successful, doing what you love, etc.
Straw man. Nothing is guaranteed to make you rich. Entrepreneurship certainly has vastly more potential to make you rich.
And if we're not talking about being rich strictly, but are implicitly including a quality of life component, well, the information I've seen[1] implies that entrepreneurship is near the income level of other professionals and has a higher sense of well-being.
Successful business starts with either tons of capital, experience, and power, or meaning/passion. He has a point. Middle brow MBAs and other business persons that you describe are not going to be making as much as you think for these reasons alone.
Almost all of the successful “entrepreneurs” I know are just rich kids who had the time and space to figure things out over the course of 10-15 years after college without worrying about money. Same thing for all of the successful people I know who work in media. It’s a racket.
The author presupposes the goal of being an entrepreneur is getting rich. Yet his outlier examples all infamously eschewed lavishesness. They were about building something to impact humanity.
No doubt many successful entrepreneurs have a goal of wealth in mind, but for what aim? I can justify my efforts at financial independence to live freely and not to live under any conditions which compromise my personal ethics, as one priceless example.
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