>I don't know how they do it.

They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.

Yes.

If you're 10/10 smart, you're getting a 7 figure sign on bonus to go work at Meta as an AI researcher.

If you're 6-9/10 smart, you're probably miserable somewhere.

If you're 4-5/10 smart, you are one of these people.

Why do you feel the need to simplify life into such a narrow perspective? While it's true that being smart can limit your confidence, what you've written is beyond exaggeration. There is so much more complexity involved.

There is some insight to his post. If you're very intelligent, there are many points in your life that steer you away from starting your own company. If at any point the best option you have is to start a company, you were probably not a very good student or employee.

This is largely my experience as well. The Bay Area wannabe startup crowd is brimming with idiots, people dumber than your dumbest colleague at work. Unbelievable amounts of Dunning-Kruger.

The actual grind filters out most of them, of course, but if you concede that some businesses are basically luck then some number of those idiots will make it.

I agree that intelligent people often get railroaded into a certain kind of life, but I think the prognosis is still a little off. It's clear in the US that owning a successful company has some of the highest outcomes possible in society (if financial freedom is the goal).

People who don't have those types of things in mind can only be so smart in my book.

"Successful" is the key. A winning lottery ticket is one of the quickest ways to get money, the hard part is the "winning". If you are smart, there are many career paths that are highly likely to be very profitable, with small risk of failure and a pretty high floor. That is not the case for starting a business. The upside is potentially much higher, but it is much less likely, and the downside is huge.

Having access to capital is much more important than smarts, which is why so many people starting businesses have generational money propping them up, or as a safety net. Even smart people are usually reliant on that family capital. Bill Gates’ parents were millionaires, Musk and his dad’s emerald mine, Thiel started his first hedge fund with a million dollars raised from “friends and family”.

HN mindset distilled in one comment.

Thanks. I'm going to take that as a compliment.

HN positivity distilled in one reply.

HN self-loathing distilled in a pointless thread.

I recommend taking long walks and doing breathing exercises.

so… they’re conmen

confidence man

Flowers for Algernon has something to say about this.

So Silicon Valley's big-head is based on an actual stereotype?

Yeah, except that Big Head was, as far as I understood, just sleepwalking or floating through life. He more or less wholly lacked that unquenchable thirst for money that motivates MBA frat boys to yell at balding beta cucks to type the code faster before AI replaces them...