Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by kanwisher on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:37PM (#33711142)

Elon founded two companies Zip2 and X.com which merged with PayPal, was mega rich and didn’t need to work ever again on his own efforts, before even doing SpaceX and his other ventures

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by paulryanrogers on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @05:34PM (#33712514)

Even if entirely accurate, he also had a safety net in his father. Few get into Stanford, even fewer can afford to drop out to bet on some new market.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by xyzzyz on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @08:29PM (#33713937)

How is this "safety net" relevant? Literally millions of people in America have same or better "safety net". Are they some kind of lazy losers because they haven't earned billions like Elon had?

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by paulryanrogers on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @11:10PM (#33715065)

Consciously or not, having rich parents makes taking big risks in life easier. Even estranged and rich parents could be a lifeline if a crazy plan goes sideways.

Very few in the USA have parents who own emerald mines or an equivalent amount of wealth. So they're not losers. They're just not as fortunate and--understandably--more risk averse.

I'm saying that Elon deserves a modest amount of credit for busting his ass in the early days. But not so much fawning praise since luck and birth also played a outsized role in his successes.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by datalopers on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @02:56PM (#33710529)

Add to that 20 years of wannabe tech bros fawning over your every move and you’ve got a lifetime* of never ending success.

* oh, wait.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by narcraft on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:03PM (#33710636)

Is Elon Musk no longer a billionaire? Otherwise, hard to say that his success has ended or diminished in any meaningful way.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by HWR_14 on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:11PM (#33710767)

I would guess that in 2023's rankings he will no longer be the world's richest person. That's diminished success, although still an astounding level of it.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by randomdata on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:20PM (#33710912)

> That's diminished success

That's diminished wealth. Wealth is factored into success, but is not the only unit of it. One can see diminished wealth at the same time as realizing gains elsewhere to no net change or even net gain.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by HWR_14 on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:34PM (#33711842)

The person I was responding to used wealth as the signal of success. But, unless I mispredict how things will go at Twitter over the next year, we are likely to see a major failure attributed to Elon.

Again, not that he won't be fantastically wealthy or successful. But he will probably take a nasty hit to both his wealth and his reputation because of Twitter.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by randomdata on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @05:36PM (#33712538)

He alluded to Musk's wealth being the only signal that may have diminished. His presence in the public mind has blown up more than ever as of late, so on that metric alone his success is growing. It would require a substantial hit elsewhere (like his wealth) to see diminishing success overall.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by HWR_14 on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @06:58PM (#33713257)

That's not what the poster said. He said that if unless Musk was no longer a billionaire Musk was still successful.

I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive. Most of the news for Elon this year has been: "billionaire tries to back out of ill advised takeover event", "billionaire loses lawsuit", "speed run to twitter's destruction", "advertisers pause relationship with Twitter", "fires half of twitter workforce, then asks some of those people to come back to work", "loyalty oath leaves some twitter teams with 0 or 1 employees", "locks doors of Twitter until Monday following, changes mind and asks all twitter employees to race in Friday night"

Taking the sink into Twitter was lighthearted and fun. Everything since then was a disaster. It hasn't made Musk look like a good leader. Literally doing nothing would have been a better plan, and he still could have made news whenever he wanted by doing anything - after he knew what he wanted to do.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by randomdata on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @07:08PM (#33713330)

> That's not what the poster said. He said that if unless Musk was no longer a billionaire Musk was still successful.

Yes, exactly. Given his increasing success elsewhere, it is suggested he would have to fall below billionaire status for the net change to run negative. The other commenter was quite clear that a a million dollar loss wouldn't see a net decline in his success, even though a million dollar loss would unquestionably be a decline in wealth.

> I don't feel that the reason he's been in the public mind is positive.

We're talking about success, though, not positive qualities. Often the people with the most positive qualities aren't even considered successful at all. They are very much unrelated.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by cutthegrass2 on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @08:24AM (#33718811)

From a recent count I saw, Elon could afford to loose $100B and still be the richest person on the planet.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you h... by kolleykibber on Thursday November 24, 2022 @05:38AM (#33729780)

This isn't true (since 89)

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

Keeps coming up, even though it's a pretty easy google.

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