Re:Stop building dumb stuff
by imgabe on Sunday October 21, 2012 @08:41PM
(#4681360)
There's an implicit assumption here that entrepreneurial motivation is fungible, that a person who could found a successful cat picture business could also found a successful education startup just as easily. I don't think that's the case. In turning someone away from something they're truly interested in and guilting them into working on a more "serious" business, the most likely result is a failed education startup in place of a successful cat pictures business. In terms of relative utility, a successful business is almost always going to be more beneficial to the world than a failed one.
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Right, there's a simplifying assumption of fungibility in my post. In your counter example, you go to the other extreme, where its either a successful but low-social-utility business, or an unsuccessful high-social-utility one.
In reality, the entrepreneur is going to have to make some tradeoff between likelihood of success (given motivation) and utility of success.
But entrepreneurs intuitively make these sort of tradeoffs all the time. This is just another judgement to make.