Re:Start-ups tend to flourish following a downturn
by petercooper on Saturday December 06, 2008 @03:50PM
(#388333)
The title is taken from this quote in the article and feels like a legitimate summary of the tone of the article, which is upbeat.
There are 8 paragraphs in the article. The concept of startups or starting a company is not introduced until the fifth paragraph. Since the focus of the article is not startups, the title of this HN post is a poor summary to me - it feels worded just to get modded up.
Re:Start-ups tend to flourish following a downturn
by skmurphy on Tuesday December 09, 2008 @01:13AM
(#391021)
If you look at the last two dozen articles matstc has submitted over the last nine months (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=matstc ) none of them substantially modify the original title, and in fact this title is taken from a subtitle in the article. If it was "worded just to get modded up" it would be unusual behaviour on matstc's part. The subtitle starts the section of the article that HN readers would be interested in.
"Carl Schramm, the head of the Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes entrepreneurial activity, points out that start-ups tend to flourish in the year that follows a sharp downturn."
I think flourish in this context means "many are started" not "many are doing well three to five years later." I am a committed entrepreneur but I think too many blog posts and articles are encouraging folks who are not fundamentally entrepreneurs to try something that will likely fail and leave them worse off, not better. The penalty for this in your forties and fifties is much higher than in your twenties. Many of these laid off folks might be much better served to wait out this worldwide recession over the next year to 18 months by frugal living and part time work, not by spending any funds trying to start a business.
I blogged about this in "We Don't Encourage Individuals to Form a Start-up" http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/12/04/we-dont-encourage-in...