
The word entrepreneur and its baggage - johns
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1685-the-word-entrepreneur-and-its-baggage
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ryanwaggoner
I hate these kinds of blog posts, because they make it sound like starting a
business isn't about risk or hard work anymore. Supposedly, the advent of
technology has made succeeding at your own company so easy that _anyone_ can
do it. You don't need to write a business plan, get an MBA, or even have any
experience. Furthermore, you won't even need to work hard at it!

The problem is that the barriers to entry don't just drop for you...they drop
for your competitors too. So now it's even harder to compete within a given
market because of the sheer volume of competition. You may find cases at the
edge (37signals' home and soapbox) where money, risk, hard work, a plan,
education, experience, and connections didn't matter, but they're complete
outliers. You're probably better off playing the lottery.

~~~
jpwagner
Agreed.

By the way, why does this concept pop up so often currently in our culture?
(even an amateur can be successful)

ie, American Idol, World Series of Poker, Millionaire gameshows...etc

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frig
It's part of the american folk mythology (for a real obvious-in-hindsight
example, consider Star Wars (original trilogy): Luke goes from farm hand to
ace fighter pilot with no training, and becomes a passable jedi with a few
months of training...).

It probably originates 50% from the urban/rural divide and 50% from the
underlying outlook of protestantism. In brief:

\- much of american history consists of pioneers going and settling the land,
then -- decades later -- the 'experts' show up (these could be anything from
farm scientists to law enforcement to general government busybodies). So
there's this weird split between respect for learning and accomplishment (no,
really!) but on the other hand the belief that you can really boostrap
yourself / figure things out by yourself just fine. Anything that plays into
the belief you could perform at an 'expert' level with only a very minimal
amount of training is therefore good entertainment.

\- the basic protestant outlook is that your (personal) salvation is
predetermined (though perhaps you can mess it up), and that consequently
nothing you do can earn salvation if you weren't already gifted it; however,
there's a parallel belief that God will show favor upon the saved, eg by
granting them success in their worldly endeavors...and so, loosely speaking, a
protestant-minded person would interpret someone attaining expert-level
performance in a very short period of time as a sign that that person had been
gifted with salvation.

At this point in time I'd say neither of those reasons is self-consciously
driving the meme's dominance, but those are some of the deep roots of that
particular outlook, most likely.

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ryanwaggoner
_the basic protestant outlook is that your (personal) salvation is
predetermined_

Totally OT, but I wanted to point out that predestination is most closely
associated with Calvinism, which only occupies a subset of Protestantism. The
Arminian school of theology is also part of Protestantism.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Calvinist-
Arminian_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Calvinist-
Arminian_debate)

~~~
frig
Yeah, but cf your copy of _The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of
Capitalism_ to see this argument brought out in full; I'll also handwave and
point out that in general, even when the nitty-gritty specifics of belief
systems are the stuff wars are fought over, it's surprisingly common for
second-order attudinal-and-behavioral consequences of a particular group's
outlook to thoroughly permeate the broader society it's found in.

That's a fancy way of saying that, eg., even though the predestination thing
is a mainly Calvinist outlook, the knock-on effects of that belief -- working
hard but hoping for some 'answer from above' to arrive in the form of earthly
success -- have pretty much permeated the deep subconscious of the American
outlook.

You can see it manifest all the time, with people attributing success to
innate characteristics -- eg, smarts or talent or whatnot -- and not to the
work and training that developed those characteristics; this is a more-
rational take on the same basic idea (earthly success == sign of grace, not
earthly success == mix of lucky breaks and hard effort).

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tsally
I found five examples to back up my case, so listen to me! As all the YC
companies can tell you, for your average case building a business still takes
a lot of work.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Forget the YC companies...almost _anyone_ who has started any kind of business
will tell you that it's a lot of work.

~~~
davidw
It seems like it would be a natural equilibrium for it to be a lot of work
unless it's something where it's basically impossible to not work a lot. If
person A works 5 hours a week, and person B does 20, even if person B only
gets twice as much done as A, there's still twice as much going into the
business. I guess there are outliers, where someone gets really lucky and
manages to stumble on to some sort of very easily defensible barrier to entry,
but that's not the norm.

~~~
eru
Depends on the business. If A's shorter working hours allow him to offer
dramatically lowered costs, then he may succeed.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Example?

~~~
eru
Startups like other companies, too, have to pay for their factors of
production. Labour is one of them. The labour of the founder also has to be
payed --- either explicit or implicit.

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jmtame
I heard about this guy who preached a "4 hour workweek" yet he probably worked
>80 hours a week.

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volida
what a lame article

