and THEN they will start a nice side business where they brag about their success and what they did to ensure it - re-emphasising the survivorship bias.
Or the "self made" success story who got just a "minor" cash injection of $500k from their parents' slush fund and then could afford to not generate any income for 5 years.
Unfortunately the stats on all these (and on this site in particular) are going to be extremely skewed. I'd hazard a guess that just the viewership of HN already heavily skews the sample towards a very privileged %ile of the total population.
Jesus, almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor on that one...
But yea, I know the feel. I worked in tech for a long time and didn't have any connections. Its frustrating hearing stories of people getting funding jsut by knowing teh right people and being able to secure hundreds of thousands for a seed round. While I'm strong in tech, I am complete trash when it comes to design or sales.
Luckily I met my cofounders thoughts. mutual friend. they get me funding and I can focus on building our startup. Since I worked in a few other startups previously, I was able to benefit from watching and avoiding the mistakes they made that caused them, to fail. Now get to call the shots when it comes to engineering and we've been growing steadily and getting traction despite the bad economy.
In all seriousness I know what you mean.
A lot of entrepreneurs come from well off families because they can afford to say no, or spend time on a bunch of middling ideas until they strike it rich on a single one.
I'm finally getting to the point where I might feel comfortable going off on my own venture (I have a bit of a safety net built up, but no family to count on still if things go awry). It's nice, but at the back of my head I'm still struggling to let go of what's providing me stability. That and being American I'm about one health problem away from losing it all so...
I would love for the stability that allows others to "self actualize", so to speak.