> “It’s so stupid that these people play the startup lottery. What idiots. They should just consult.” or “Startups need to stop glorifying young workers that can work all day and night”
No-one quite says that working hard is stupid (well, except the few misguided ones we should all ignore anyway). What people go tsk, tsk, tsk at is working really hard and giving up responsibilities at home, not being with you family, even forgoing the biological imperative to reproduce (or delaying it -- usually not a good idea, again biologically speaking), giving up your mental/physical health for a dream that is realistically very remote, etc.
The other big thing is, alas, it is a lottery. We guide our nephews toward a different direction that has a greater promise of economic security: be a neurosurgeon (and well, even if they don't become neurosurgeons, we hope they'll become at least primary care doctors :)). I mean, What is YC's acceptance rate at this point? Like 10%? And I bet the people applying are more able than other hopeful entrepreneurs who don't happen to apply to YC, so the success rate for the average entrepreneur is pretty bad.
Calling it a lottery is silly. I know some people who would have close to a 100% chance of getting into YC if they applied. I know other people who would have close to a 0% chance.
Maybe so but I thought the lottery wasn't getting into YC but working for a start up that becomes successful. In that sense it's very much like a lottery: you have a tiny probability of succeeding, but if you succeed you get an extremely large sum of money.
I'm not entirely sure it's like a lottery in terms of the expected value being negative though (if you consider the opportunity cost as a negative).
Its a lottery if you blind folded yourself and pointed at the startup you work at.
You can always mitigate the risk by researching and making an educated decision about where you work. Different startups have different degrees of risk.
Indeed, but the probabilities are still so low that it's like a lottery. Obviously it's not an actual lottery, just similar to one in the sense of low probability high reward.
Even a lottery is not a lottery by that account; statistics professor Joan R. Ginther won four multi-million dollar jackpots in Texas because he found a "pattern" in the lottery numbers, just like how very clever people find patterns in our world and hit the market as a "startup". So generalizing the advice to everyone: "hey! start/join a startup" is bad. Only the smart and well-connected Stanford kids have a realistic chance of getting a return. The rest of us should work hard, just not in starry-eyed startup happenings.
It isn't random, but it sure isn't a guarantee that being smart and working hard will pay off either. If it must be compared to some game, I guess poker would be more apt than a lottery.
If you're smart, and work hard you can make the right moves to put yourself in an improved position for possible success, but ultimately you are still playing odds with lots of variables that are completely out of your control and even if you play "perfectly" it is entirely possible you still fail.
In poker you can deal with this variance via bankroll management, for which the startup version would be not to invest too much of yourself (emotionally and/or physically) in any one startup. However, the culture around startups (unlike the culture around smart poker play) does not promote that at all, rather it tends to promote a leave-everything-on-the-floor approach... which, IMO, is the sort of position most people are really complaining about when they say things such as what sama paraphrased in the article.
Just because you have some outliers doesn't mean it isn't random. As long as you're good but not the best of the best of the best, it's random pretty much by definition. An old pg's essay covers it well: http://paulgraham.com/judgement.html.
No-one quite says that working hard is stupid (well, except the few misguided ones we should all ignore anyway). What people go tsk, tsk, tsk at is working really hard and giving up responsibilities at home, not being with you family, even forgoing the biological imperative to reproduce (or delaying it -- usually not a good idea, again biologically speaking), giving up your mental/physical health for a dream that is realistically very remote, etc.
The other big thing is, alas, it is a lottery. We guide our nephews toward a different direction that has a greater promise of economic security: be a neurosurgeon (and well, even if they don't become neurosurgeons, we hope they'll become at least primary care doctors :)). I mean, What is YC's acceptance rate at this point? Like 10%? And I bet the people applying are more able than other hopeful entrepreneurs who don't happen to apply to YC, so the success rate for the average entrepreneur is pretty bad.