Today it will largely come down to the investment of time... that doesn't mean you will succeed... I spent my time on knowledge growth, others will spend it on building a business. Most will simply waste it and complain that they spend too much time working.
I saw a lot of this when I was single in the last decade. So many people want a relationship, too few would actually take the time to make it happen. Most won't even take the time/effort to go out on a date on a work night.
No, it's not easy. There are no guarantees... but it's mostly laziness that stops people from getting things done in life.
> That's more than all of Scandinavia's population combined. Goes a long way toward explaining why so many "big" startups come from the USA.
Expand it to all of the European countries with free healthcare to match the populations and the outcome is the same.
There is some subset that has to bail because of healthcare, but it’s not relevant in the larger picture.
The children of the top 1% make up 14.5% of the admissions to these schools. The chart of students by parental income[0] speaks for itself.
The children of the bottom 20% make up a mere 3.8% of the student body. I'm not sure how anyone can look at the current situation and suggest there's nothing wrong with it.
Perhaps these people are inherently inferior? Instead, I would suggest that we should do something about the talent that we're intentionally wasting.
[0] Chetty R. et al, Figure I. B, MOBILITY REPORT CARDS: THE ROLE OF COLLEGES IN INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY, Page 80. url: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23618/w236..., image: https://i.redd.it/tbh2qmozodv91.png
I don't view 95% of the population making up 58% of the student body as an indicator that we're doing things particularly well. Especially when you don't ignore the fact the bottom 20% make up only 3.8% of students and the bottom 60% of the population only account for 18%.
These statistics fly in the face of any belief in meritocracy, social mobility, access to education, academic achievement etc. They imply either the children of the top 5% are genetic superhumans or that, as a society, we're failing spectacularly at living up to those goals.
Yeah, and then go on to create things like Theranos, Alameda and FTX... never mind the obscene amount of these kids who end up in banks and hedge funds because of their connections that end up destroying the global economy thorough their grift.
I'm a former boot-strapped founder and a strong believer in entrepreneurialism, but you have to be brain-dead levels of naive to not know the odds are entirely against coming in you but to then think you're on the same playing field as the children of the privileged makes it clear one really doesn't have the slightest skill-set it takes to make it in that World: if your discernment is woefully inadequate to see the reality of being wealthy, how can you ever see, build and ultimately profit from market or paradigm shifts?
> However, if you don't come from one of these blessed demographics in the USA, you have a much harder road. If you didn't go to an "elite" school and don't have a parental safety net it's very difficult... I fall into this category and simply didn't have access to healthcare for five years while I pursued my tiny indie business. It made money, but not enough to buy healthcare for a family, so I had to ditch it.
I think these are the untold stories that really should be more widely known and perhaps even celebrated: when something doesn't reach unicorn level, but still does what it sought out to do but cannot grow/scale in order to justify it's immense effort is more honest and real to the reality of how most small startups go and end up.
Personally speaking my end-goal was to ultimately challenge Federal Law to make hemp legal in order to serve as a much needed cash crop to help offset climate change via carbon sequestration and possibly aid in the decrease use of opioids for pain and provide more usecases for something I feel incredibly passionate about: Bitcoin and Farmers.
After the Farm bill was passed in 2018, nearly 4 years since launch, I realized 'we won' as I saw all the signs in front of my face I saw no point in working 90+ hour work weeks and having no Life what so ever because I dissapointed my partners and family so I just leveraged my acquired skill-set in various private Industries and continued to travel the World for new opportunities.
Ultimately the money I made, in BTC, could have made me a millionaire several times if I never spent it and just held on to it over the years, but as mentioned before I was also not of the privileged class and needed those funds to ever rising rents, food, or the rainy day funds use in between jobs.
I don't regret it, but like JB I had to exit and focus on other priorities when I realized the reality that it was never going to be much more than it was, profitable but not b much, never mind ever being a unicorn.
I've since did corpo life and to be honest, their is a reason former startup founders are preferable over most candidates, the harder part is actually getting your foot in the door to be able to prove why that is.
Much of America does have an amazing "safety net": generational wealth.
There's a reason why startups tend to spring from elite schools like Stanford, MIT, Yale, etc. Those kids have the brains, yes, but also the family connections and the parental safety nets and the connections to capital investment. These kids don't have to worry about food security or having healthcare.
If you're from that upper 10%/5%/1% or so of American society, that's GREAT!
It's an incredible primordial soup from which startups can spring. We are a big country, so we are still talking about perhaps 30,000,000+ people in this lucky category. That's more than all of Scandinavia's population combined. Goes a long way toward explaining why so many "big" startups come from the USA.
However, if you don't come from one of these blessed demographics in the USA, you have a much harder road. If you didn't go to an "elite" school and don't have a parental safety net it's very difficult... I fall into this category and simply didn't have access to healthcare for five years while I pursued my tiny indie business. It made money, but not enough to buy healthcare for a family, so I had to ditch it.