Bad fit for this community. He’s right. The entrepeneur world is full of the wrong sorts of people to be starting businesses, unless your only criteria for “success” is getting bought-out early for a ridiculous amount, letting all the employees go, and telling existing customers to go fuck themselves.
Those with a legitimate problem to solve tend to have the will and motivation to see that it, or more likely whatever small portion they’ve figured out, stays solved, at least for a good while.
I think my problem with this is:
OP is mythologizing childhood, “broken” is really vague and could mean different things to different people but to my mind it means “abused” and obviously people who were abused as children are not any better at running companies than those who weren’t.
Well-adjusted people can also be entrepreneurial and solve problems!
Oh no, think of all the be-smirched well-adjusted people! Otoh, succeeding in the entrepeneurial world generally takes a pretty high-degree of being “well-adjusted”, regardless of mental-health issues stemming from abuse or otherwise.
There are also plenty of other things that can put a chip on one’s shoulder or break a person besides childhood trauma.
Bad fit for this community. He’s right. The entrepeneur world is full of the wrong sorts of people to be starting businesses, unless your only criteria for “success” is getting bought-out early for a ridiculous amount, letting all the employees go, and telling existing customers to go fuck themselves.
… works for me
I mean, I know 3 people who launched “Startups” and 2 of them had serious “ARE YOU PROUD OF ME NOW DADDY!?!” energy.
No idea who this guy is quoting, but sadly, yeah. Between 60 - 80% of people that have started a business have very poor mental health / are mentally ill. Business owners are n-times(2x -> 10x depending on mental health condition) more likely to suffer from ADHD, depression, substance abuse or suicidal thoughts. I wouldn’t discount things like obsessions either.
Yeah it’s true. Non-startup business owner here. Broken from childhood although cishet white male from a first world country. Adhd high probability. Some OCD too. Employees are content with my OCD due to software development context. X) you gotta make that chip on your shoulder work for you instead of terrorizing the world with your problematic energy.
Going by that logic, I should be a billionaire now.
I talked to a guy who was trying to found a start-up and I asked him why he was doing it. He said “Because I’m unemployable.” Another person I know is working on it because she eventually wants to be in a position where no one can tell her what to do. Not being OK with working for other people seems like it might be a common trait.
I do know one guy who went through with it simply because he thought that the thing that he invented was so cool that he couldn’t stop working on it. I suppose that’s also not something a normal person would do, but it’s more positive.
I do know one guy who went through with it simply because he thought that the thing that he invented was so cool that he couldn’t stop working on it.
What’s wrong with that? If it was commercially viable, then that’s a great reason to make a startup.
There’s nothing wrong with it in the moral sense, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. This guy was ultimately successful. However, he had to spend years living very modestly, working very hard, and borrowing money. That whole time, he was under a huge amount of stress because the whole endeavor could easily have ended in failure, leaving him with nothing.
That’s not something most people would want to do even if they were capable of it, and I actually wonder if he would have been better off if he had gotten a normal job instead. He wouldn’t have as much money as he does, but he would still be quite comfortable, he wouldn’t have gone through panic-attack levels of stress, and maybe he would have married and had a child (which made him very, very happy) a lot earlier than he actually did.
