I guess the thing that always sticks out to me is: access to seed capital to bootstrap.
How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job, and still feed themselves and family and pay mortgage ... to go off for months to a year to build a product to bootstrap something like that?
If you get into Y Combinator or whatever, there is at least a partial answer to that. Though clearly it comes with some really intense "strings attached."
This seems like a yawning gap in technology and it biases the set of solutions and products out there to those things that feed the VC furnace.
Rich parents; Google, Amazon et al were started in a garage.
This is what I don't get about today; just owning a house with some extra space, an internet connection, and being young and not having to work because your parents can support you into your 20's already gives people a huge advantage.
But loads of people enter their 20's deep in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, etc. Little or no innovation can happen in those conditions, let alone starting families and the like.
Google only partially started in Susan Wojcicki's parent's garage. The reality is that L&S already did a bunch of the Google work at Stanford.
Same with e.g. Netscape. It started as a fork of Mosaic, already developed and paid for by a team.
Anyways, largely agreeing with you. Rich parents or favourable conditions generally play into it.
The other thing is that these conditions also tend to bias things such that even for the people who "bootstrap", they're young; which means that experienced, "wise" engineers ... who generally have lives and responsibilities ... are on the whole excluded. Which I think has a deleterious effect on the kind of products/projects that can make it to market.
Agreed A LOT of successful founder stories fall apart when you dig below the surface.
Being born to parents rich enough that you could pursue an expensive education at a prestigious school, possibly beyond a 4 year degree. And then have the luxury of falling back to "living at home" with parents who own a home in a HCOL area where all the action is like NYC/SF/Seattle/Boston. And finally falling back on parental skills or connections because being in a HCOL area, they are distinguished professionals themselves who can give you legal/sales advice or hand you your first customers.
My parents handed me the newspaper with lawn care jobs circled when I turned 16. If I didn't succeed in college, and get a good job.. living-at-home would be in a shared bedroom with a younger sibling in an exurb.
And I was STILL lucky, probably in the economic top 10 or 20%, because I had a home to fall back on, 25% scholarship + 50% family funding which left me with minimal loans.
Most of these success stories are from kids who started in the 5% and got into the 0.1%.
It’s possible with hard work and decent luck, but if you look behind the scenes it almost always involves family money. There’s a lot of carefully cultivated imagery around hardworking founders, and it’s true that many of them put in long hours, but that’s not sufficient in most cases unless you can also take advantage of things like free real estate or being able to get your first million in funding from your parent’s friends.
There’s a similar vein of story which repeats frequently in the news where some young couple has a “we bought a house in our 20s!” feel-good story and it’s like “I packed lunch every day, only went out to eat once a week, and we lived in my parent’s investment apartment for 3 years rent free” where the Calvinist tone directs all of the attention to the first part.
There are actually other options. I'm 38 and managed to eke out about 2 years of runway without touching VC money from grants and private donations. No family money or huge savings.
If you're building interesting things in an area where many people are annoyed with the status quo, you can according to my survivorship bias have money thrown at you, which then becomes self-reinforcing, since you can put more time into the project and find more success.
But there's admittedly a chicken and egg problem. I only got to that point by not having much work-life balance.
I think the issue is a lot of people think "I have an idea and all I need is money" versus "I have these skills and constraints what is an idea I can make work with them."
You don't need to do those things though. I'm almost 40, I like programming. I do it for fun in my own time. I've got couple of projects that earn around a 1/3 of my salary every month without doing too much more with then. I plan on making a few of those. Some will fail, some will succeed. I still get to pick what I work on and enjoy doing it. If they all fail then it doesn't matter too much.
>How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job, and still feed themselves and family and pay mortgage ... to go off for months to a year to build a product to bootstrap something like that?
Work on it part time or save money beforehand by living below your means (which you really should do anyways but that's besides the point).
How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job
Depending on what you did the first 20 years of your career, it isn't unreasonable to be 45 and have enough savings that going without pay for 12 months is feasible, especially if you come from a well off background. This is doubly true if you have a partner that also has a job. Also at 45 you hopefully have enough professional contacts that getting a new job if your business fails isn't impossible.
Another option is to bootstrap in your free time and then quit your job once you have your first customer. I've had at least a couple of colleagues that have done that.
I could maybe do 12 months without bringing in a paycheque by digging into savings, for sure.
The problem is that to properly bootstrap does mean there's things you'll need to pay out of pocket for that aren't just your own labour: for me this would be things like UX / graphic design, hosting costs, etc. That stuff can add up.
> How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job, and still feed themselves and family and pay mortgage ... to go off for months to a year to build a product to bootstrap something like that?
They can’t. That’s why bootstrap capitalism is largely a myth. When you scratch the surface what you often find is inherited wealth. If a person starts with a free house or a million dollars they have a massive advantage.
There's a massive number of small businesses in the US owned by immigrants that came to the US with fairly little. It's fair to say you prefer a regular job or VC money to the hell those immigrants went through but that is different than it being even close to impossible.
Yes, but also consider that most of those were smaller businesses with different revenue prospects. It’s still an accomplishment but the feel good stories which feature in the news are things like “Mark started a billion dollar company in his dorm room”, not “Lan worked 80 hour weeks to start a solid restaurant which provides a decent middle class income but no likelihood of becoming actually rich”.
I mean we're talking about an article on lifestyle businesses so going from "I can't bootstrap a lifestyle business on my own" to "I can't bootstrap a billion dollar business on my own" seems to be moving the goal post.
We’re talking about an article which also talked about the allure of growing billion dollar companies which YC uses to recruit. My point was simply that there’s a LOT of marketing for “be your own boss” concepts which sound like you’re a lot better off than, say, the typical immigrant who works hard and ends up with a small business paying a decent but not noteworthy income. Those narratives rarely end with “you too could own a laundromat and convenience store in Flushing!”
It’s not just about setting realistic expectations but also recognizing how often there are opportunities which only people with assets can take. For example, being married to someone high income with health insurance means that you are able to take a chance even if it won’t pay the bills immediately whereas someone else is limited to what they can do on the weekends.
There are also immigrants who came to America who started businesses using their wealth from their home countries, like my in-laws who are literally revanchist counter-revolutionaries in exile. Immigrants as a class are the most highly-resources people among the population of their home country, even if they are relatively lower status in the place they arrive.
How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job, and still feed themselves and family and pay mortgage ... to go off for months to a year to build a product to bootstrap something like that?
If you get into Y Combinator or whatever, there is at least a partial answer to that. Though clearly it comes with some really intense "strings attached."
This seems like a yawning gap in technology and it biases the set of solutions and products out there to those things that feed the VC furnace.