Can't the same be said of accountants or wall streeters? Top founders like Bazos, Jobs and Gates all seem to have pretty solid mariages; is the divorce rate higher for people who have tried to start a business or is it just an excuse for these tragedies that people of all walks of life have to contend with?
Not having money will generally screw your chances with women and is very well documented. Instability I don't know about. I can't imagine it'd help.
Gates was funded by a wealthy attorney father. Apple got revenue fairly quickly and was huge soon after launch.
Amazon I don't know about but the site was a market darling even during the years they hemorrhaged money. That funding would provide a more stable environment than some basement shop without Ivy league credentials struggling to attract VC.
This is a different environment than any startup I or many others could attempt. That kind of financial backing or quick success helps tremendously. I could never start Pandora and struggle for years given the cost of my insulin.
If I quit my job and started a business I would sacrifice stable earnings and existing assets for the chance of ruin and success. It's different with wealthy parents or with investor confidence. There's a safety net. Not many people jump without one - for good reason.
It shouldn't be romanticized. It should be realistically assessed. If you're deluding yourself about that there's too high a chance your personal worries and rose-colored glasses will doom your business.
You may be able to succeed and many do. But if you can't admit the possibility of failure and realistically assess risk or evaluate opportunity costs you have no place running a business. I used to make money reselling computers on ebay. I made good cash. But the shit I never considered ate away at my profits the most.
The difference on Wall Street or working as an accountant is that you generally know where the next paycheck is coming. That's something most people can't handle or survive losing. Even the insurance is a safety net that a family with children needs desperately.
I was diabetic at a young age. How would my mom have coped if my dad had sacrificed insurance and steady income for the chance of riches when I got sick? Think she'd stick around?
My first real girlfriend's father (let's call him David) was a reclusive "entrepreneur". He basically had the idea/vision for Google Earth about 20 years before that application actually appeared. By the time I met him, we were just before the first dot com era.
Every time I would go over to my girlfriend's house, David would be sitting either in the kitchen or in his basement office, much to our teenage hormone-induced frustration. When I first met my girlfriend, I'd assumed her family was at least upper middle class. Their house was at least twice as big as my family's. It was in a better part of the city. In my world, they were rich. Little did I know that the house was rented, that David hadn't contributed income to the family in several years, and that her mom was working two jobs to sustain everyone.
Even as a teenager just coming to grips with relationships, I saw utter contempt growing like a cancer in the marriage of my girlfriend's parents. I saw a man have to check-in his ego as he asked his wife for what basically amounted to allowance, which he'd often pass on to my girlfriend. About the only thing that was his in the entire house was his laptop. There, he sat and "worked" on his business. He was like one of those business founders who seeks out a technical co-founder. Except he had no technical co-founder. So he tried to do everything himself, piecing the system together using awfully mis-used tools, usually whatever he could get his hands on for free.
David had one gigantic -- yet common, at the time -- weakness as an "entrepreneur". He put too much emphasis on his idea and wanting to get funding to build it out. He couldn't realize that if it never got built, the value of his idea could never be realized and that investors had a hard time perceiving potential value. It was a chicken and egg problem. On the other hand, if it never got built, he could take solace in it never failing either. He always made it sound so impressive, the idea could sit on his slide deck's and in his head where it would never be critiqued by the marketplace.
On more than one occasion, I thought to myself what an asshole he was for making his wife work two jobs. He'd been working at this for at least 5 years and had nothing to show for it. I stupidly brought this up during a heated argument with my girlfriend. I forget why, but I was trying to get her on my side about something. She'd shared similar thoughts with me before, citing frustration that he could never provide for her and her mom. Instead, my girlfriend got really upset with me. Lesson learned, if I was right, that meant her dad, as a person was a complete and utter failure and had been for most of her conscious life. Try having to accept that as a teenager who was daddy's little girl.
One day during the height of the dot com era, some guy from the U.S. (I was in Canada at the time) phoned him up out of the blue. My girlfriend called me up asking me over to dinner. This gentleman would be the guest and he wanted to meet the family. We'll call this guy Rob. Rob claimed to have a deep network with the elite in the United States. He wanted to bring David down to California to pitch the idea to investors.
I couldn't believe it. But for once I saw my girlfriend look to her dad with pride, and the contempt between husband and wife seemed to have washed away. Yet, there were some oddities. Rob hadn't flown up from the U.S. to visit David. He'd driven; in an early 1990s Mustang LX (the crappy one with an inline 4 cylinder and this being 1999). And they'd drive to California... from Toronto. Bringing details like this up would cause Rob not to get confrontational. Instead, he'd cite his love for long road trips and wanting to make a few stop-offs to introduce David to some elite families along the way. I bought in; even when the stories started to get more grandiose. Rob claimed he was a first cousin of a U.S. senator whose family is one of those fairytale American dynasties. One day after Rob had left, David even showed me a fax that he'd r...
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 30.1 ms ] threadGates was funded by a wealthy attorney father. Apple got revenue fairly quickly and was huge soon after launch.
Amazon I don't know about but the site was a market darling even during the years they hemorrhaged money. That funding would provide a more stable environment than some basement shop without Ivy league credentials struggling to attract VC.
This is a different environment than any startup I or many others could attempt. That kind of financial backing or quick success helps tremendously. I could never start Pandora and struggle for years given the cost of my insulin.
If I quit my job and started a business I would sacrifice stable earnings and existing assets for the chance of ruin and success. It's different with wealthy parents or with investor confidence. There's a safety net. Not many people jump without one - for good reason.
It shouldn't be romanticized. It should be realistically assessed. If you're deluding yourself about that there's too high a chance your personal worries and rose-colored glasses will doom your business.
You may be able to succeed and many do. But if you can't admit the possibility of failure and realistically assess risk or evaluate opportunity costs you have no place running a business. I used to make money reselling computers on ebay. I made good cash. But the shit I never considered ate away at my profits the most.
The difference on Wall Street or working as an accountant is that you generally know where the next paycheck is coming. That's something most people can't handle or survive losing. Even the insurance is a safety net that a family with children needs desperately.
I was diabetic at a young age. How would my mom have coped if my dad had sacrificed insurance and steady income for the chance of riches when I got sick? Think she'd stick around?
Bezos was already well beyond f-u money when he left D.E. Shaw to found Amazon.
Jobs did not have a stable personal life during Apple's early days; he did not meet his wife until several years after he was removed from Apple.
My first real girlfriend's father (let's call him David) was a reclusive "entrepreneur". He basically had the idea/vision for Google Earth about 20 years before that application actually appeared. By the time I met him, we were just before the first dot com era.
Every time I would go over to my girlfriend's house, David would be sitting either in the kitchen or in his basement office, much to our teenage hormone-induced frustration. When I first met my girlfriend, I'd assumed her family was at least upper middle class. Their house was at least twice as big as my family's. It was in a better part of the city. In my world, they were rich. Little did I know that the house was rented, that David hadn't contributed income to the family in several years, and that her mom was working two jobs to sustain everyone.
Even as a teenager just coming to grips with relationships, I saw utter contempt growing like a cancer in the marriage of my girlfriend's parents. I saw a man have to check-in his ego as he asked his wife for what basically amounted to allowance, which he'd often pass on to my girlfriend. About the only thing that was his in the entire house was his laptop. There, he sat and "worked" on his business. He was like one of those business founders who seeks out a technical co-founder. Except he had no technical co-founder. So he tried to do everything himself, piecing the system together using awfully mis-used tools, usually whatever he could get his hands on for free.
David had one gigantic -- yet common, at the time -- weakness as an "entrepreneur". He put too much emphasis on his idea and wanting to get funding to build it out. He couldn't realize that if it never got built, the value of his idea could never be realized and that investors had a hard time perceiving potential value. It was a chicken and egg problem. On the other hand, if it never got built, he could take solace in it never failing either. He always made it sound so impressive, the idea could sit on his slide deck's and in his head where it would never be critiqued by the marketplace.
On more than one occasion, I thought to myself what an asshole he was for making his wife work two jobs. He'd been working at this for at least 5 years and had nothing to show for it. I stupidly brought this up during a heated argument with my girlfriend. I forget why, but I was trying to get her on my side about something. She'd shared similar thoughts with me before, citing frustration that he could never provide for her and her mom. Instead, my girlfriend got really upset with me. Lesson learned, if I was right, that meant her dad, as a person was a complete and utter failure and had been for most of her conscious life. Try having to accept that as a teenager who was daddy's little girl.
One day during the height of the dot com era, some guy from the U.S. (I was in Canada at the time) phoned him up out of the blue. My girlfriend called me up asking me over to dinner. This gentleman would be the guest and he wanted to meet the family. We'll call this guy Rob. Rob claimed to have a deep network with the elite in the United States. He wanted to bring David down to California to pitch the idea to investors.
I couldn't believe it. But for once I saw my girlfriend look to her dad with pride, and the contempt between husband and wife seemed to have washed away. Yet, there were some oddities. Rob hadn't flown up from the U.S. to visit David. He'd driven; in an early 1990s Mustang LX (the crappy one with an inline 4 cylinder and this being 1999). And they'd drive to California... from Toronto. Bringing details like this up would cause Rob not to get confrontational. Instead, he'd cite his love for long road trips and wanting to make a few stop-offs to introduce David to some elite families along the way. I bought in; even when the stories started to get more grandiose. Rob claimed he was a first cousin of a U.S. senator whose family is one of those fairytale American dynasties. One day after Rob had left, David even showed me a fax that he'd r...
I just had decided:
1. Make a lot of money and save them.(Freelancing for real)
2. Move closer to my college so I can walk and not use car.
3. Make cool stuff in my room, for fun.
Now...time for me to finish that damn game that I am getting paid to work on.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOw2yWMSfk