
Too Much Entrepreneurship Is a Bad Thing - maigret
http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2011/03/too_much_entrepreneurship_is_a.html
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baberuth
_Here's my major beef with what's happening. The real metric of business
success is whether you have a positive impact — on your industry, on your
community, on (in a small way) the world at large. That doesn't always mean
starting your own company. Most of the time, in fact, it means becoming part
of a company that you love, with a purpose you believe in, and people who you
can't imagine not working with._

Might be true at large, but my FAVORITE thing about communities of hackers is
that hackers are principally CREATORS. The reason I left a 9-5 to spend more
time with hackers in the startup community because this community self selects
the flavor of person who sees problems with the status quo, wants to fix them,
and _has the power_ to exact change (usually through code).

In contrast, most of the general populace is in "cover your ass" mode, which
is why the author is probably _generally_ right when he says, "Most of the
time [business success] means becoming part of a company that you love" -- but
not right for most HN readers.

~~~
Vivtek
Well, I'd submit it's just as true for HN readers - with the caveat that the
strategy here tends to be that if you can't find the company you love, you
make one.

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jleyank
It's all well and good being entrepreneurial, but (in the US at least), health
insurance has to be in the picture somewhere. Scavenging it from a parent or
spouse, or just running barefoot, isn't a safe long-term strategy. Work it
into the business plan, or work to change the business environment/law.

~~~
haploid
Assuming the average startup founder is under 30, this is effectively a non-
issue. When I was 24, I got a high-deductible PPO that covered almost
everything for $40/mo. That's beer money.

My point is moot if you're starting at 40, of course.

~~~
orijing
Or if you have employees...

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anamax
Why would you have employees before you can afford them?

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thirdstation
For me, the beguiling aspects of entrepreneurship are financial independence
and personal freedom.

I can't figure out the author's motivation for writing that piece. If you hire
someone and teach them so much about your business that they could go out and
start their own (hopefully non-competing), then aren't they more valuable to
you? Won't their day-to-day decisions be informed by their knowledge about how
they impact your bottom line?

As a founder of a company he sounds disingenuous when he says he admires
people who want to become part of something larger than themselves.
Appreciate, maybe. Admire? I don't think so.

Becoming part of a team is great as long as you're not sacrificing what's
important to you. They are not mutually exclusive ideas.

From the article: "But I think it's incredibly wrongheaded to compete for
talented people based on pitching a company as a training ground for someone's
individual dreams, as opposed to a place where individuals can't imagine not
being — because the product is so important, the values so robust, the culture
so engaging"

Why is a person's goals antithetical to the health of a company? It's like
he's trying to sell us on this antiquated notion that a company's worth is
derived from its mission statement and culture.

I think it's more realistic to be aware employees have hopes and dreams beyond
enriching the company.

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revorad
I can't quite see how the title, the start and the end of this article tie
together. Too many buzzwords and name dropping are definitely a bad thing.

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thirdstation
I'm deciding that his article is a troll. He had a deadline so he strung
together a bunch of ideas HN readers would hate. A classic contrarian article.

~~~
revorad
That also shows that most people don't actually read the article but love
getting into debates based entirely on the headline!

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pdenya
This title is completely off for this article and it seems to ignore more
general cases by focusing on silicon valley (which is fine, just
misrepresented because this isn't even close to true everywhere else).

I've heard tons of stories from people who have taken jobs at startups to
learn to run businesses themselves so I don't think that being up front about
providing employees with what they're looking for anyway is a bad thing.

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Cblinks
I agree with everything this blogger saids. It's funny because went attended a
conference at UNC about facilitating entrepreneurial growth and I just
remember thinking to myself that-"They are creating a new bubble".

Also, another thing to think about is that employers are also using the
entrepreneurial framework or wordplay to inspire their employees to create new
profitable departments. We are defiantly in the middle of a bubble either way.

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Herwig
Like all of you say the title throws you off. Its more a person who seems to
be threatened by younger entrepreneurs or the ambitious youth of today.

However he is right in one thing, he is not right in saying that too many
young entrepreneurs is a bad thing, he is right that we do not have enough
experienced people in company culture, finance, HR etc. aspects companies need
for after the 5 year struggle. (at least in the valley)

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mmcconnell1618
There is a difference between Entrepreneurship and playing the lottery. It
seems like the author is upset about the lack of quality entrepreneurs instead
of entrepreneurship in general. Lot of innovators creating real businesses is
good while lots of people trying to strike it rich with the next big fad is
probably not that beneficial.

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nickpinkston
As founder of a tiny startup, the biggest selling point for hiring was that
you'd get to see a startup first hand and learn how to do your own.

Results: \- One dev who's working on multiple ambitious projects \- A startup
that got into an incubator and still running \- Another startup that's still
running

Note: These last two were my interns, and I haven't had that many.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I've seen interns do great things too. One sold his webpage test app to Adobe,
still works their in a senior position. One went to a small ecommerce company
to engineer their database for scalablity - EBay didn't work out too bad for
him either.

There's very little risk of Entrepreneurship overwhelming our economy. Sure it
makes the headlines.

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haploid
In a free market, there is no such thing as "too much" of a given class of
workers. A free market corrects for a glut of N by making the expected failure
rate of N too high, or the capital available for N too low, or both.

Bubbles can affect this dynamic temporarily, but eventually they always pop,
usually leading to a temporary condition of _too little_ investment in N.
Believe me, it was not "cool" to be a dot com founder in 2001.

But in the long run, this cycle averages out such that free markets don't have
long term misallocations of resources.

Whether the system we currently have can be described as a free market,
though, is a question for another day.

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icegreentea
Can't really argue that. But the problem is that the market correction is
inherently painful. There will be an overshoot, and the correction will hurt
everyone together. I think the point of this article is to try to avoid the
worst of the overshoot, and thus the worst of the correction pain.

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JoeAltmaier
How? Its a free country, and people optimize their lives for their own
perceived benefit.

Regulate startups? Businesses operated out of garages/spare offices/abandoned
warehouses? Ridiculous -they are exactly the sort of thing that cannot be
tracked, counted, taxed or bent to someone elses view.

