There are lot of people who fall for the encouragement from PG and such and take risks without being aware of the expected financial impact. Read through comments here and there are some first hand anecdotes.
It is hugely more efficient for someone to take into account this research result, rather than learn that after years of toiling, the hard way.
Perhaps, it was not as insightful to you personally. But not every piece has to be valuable to everyone for it to avoid being classified as devoid of value.
I don't see how you can say it offers any value. There are no actionable insights here. You can't change your family, so in the end, every individual still faces exactly the same choice: pursue the entrepreneurial path, or not. What other people did and what their circumstances were is irrelevant.
If the article purported to prove that it is impossible to succeed as an entrepreneur without coming from a rich family, and if there were no counter-examples disproving that assertion, then I could see saying it had value. But we know that's not the case. People do succeed as entrepreneurs despite coming from poor families.
There are lot of people who fall for the encouragement from PG and such and take risks without being aware of the expected financial impact.
A "lot" of people do that? I'd need to see some evidence to accept that assertion. And even if that is so, this article doesn't help them. They still can't change their backgrounds / families, and they still face the same choice.
who fall for the encouragement from PG and such
That's some interesting language. You make it sound like encouraging someone to chase their dreams is some kind of scam. Oh, pity the poor gullible fool, who "fell for" the idea of trying to make a better life for him/her-self...
A more useful article, to my way of thinking, would have been one that presented the data from this article and then continued by saying "OK, so if you're not from a wealthy family, here are the things you can do to improve your odds of succeeding anyway..." That what I mean by "actionable information. Give people something they can actually use.
That would be a valuable article, and a valuable discussion.
All I see here is negativity and anti-individualistic rabble-rousing.
The article summarizes imporant data. Action items I take from the article:
* Plan that most of my competitors are better funded than I am because of family and social strata.
* Compensate for those deficits before engaging in a startup, either as founder or employee. E.g., look for an angel investor (difficult, because there are none associated with my family or friends).
* Stick to my day job.
* Be open to government policy proposals that would even the playing field - not to take it away from the wealthy, but to provide an on-ramp for the non-wealthy. E.g., regulated monopoly universal internet service. Public housing in my town does not provide internet: those kids can't even do their homework, since the teachers *assume* internet access.
Plan that most of my competitors are better funded than I am
That should be your assumption anyway. "Hope for the best, plan for the worst". Besides, most startups aren't killed by competition, they're killed by building a product nobody wants.
Compensate for those deficits before engaging in a startup
Again, anybody founding a startup already knows they are facing an uphill battle. This article doesn't present any data that would change that.
look for an angel investor (difficult, because there are none associated with my family or friends).
You think everybody who ever got angel investment got it because their friends and family knew angels? How about going to entrepreneurial themed events in your area and networking and meeting angels, VCs, and other founders there? Don't live in an area with that kind of thing? Move. (That's what I did, FWIW). Check AngelList and/or scour LinkedIn to find local angels, and find a way to work your way into an introduction to them. Hint: founders of existing startups are often very open to helping new founders network and meet investors and what-not. Cold email celebrity investors (low percentage, but Mark Cuban has done deals that came in as cold emails). Apply to go on Shark Tank.
Be open to government policy proposals that would even the playing field - not to take it away from the wealthy, but to provide an on-ramp for the non-wealthy.
Meh. These kinds of policies may be well-intentioned, but most have unintended consequences that outweigh any good they do.
How about: work at your day job and bootstrap a startup until it's cash flow positive or work as an apprentice for an entrepreneur until you can start your own.
Every successful entrepreneur I know outside of the valley has started in one of those two ways.
The idea of a "startup" having to have funding is looking at entrepreneurship in a complete backwards way.
I find it wrong that the author is using other successful companies as examples that they were built on "belief".
No, airbnb founders did not believe. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg did not believe either. Nor did Larry page.
They got there by learning from user, questioning their "belief" and iterating.
Nate: '... so I at this point decided to move to Boston. Had other priorities in my life. And pace suddenly slowed down .... Have you told Michael that I am working on other things?'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya0I6oz7q9U&fea...
Mark: '.. well, it does not have to be anything more than a college friend website. That is a great product.' https://youtu.be/aQ5otpv6kTw?t=252
Larry page: ... tried multiple times to license their technology and later sell the company for a few millions and later for a few billions. The gap in their asking price and market offer kept them going.
How? The whole point of deer analogy is to stop being negative. Whining and moaning instead of taking action is being negative. Being proactive and doing things is being positive.
The dates in this dataset are "decision" date, not the application date.
In that year, there was a fast forward movement in backlog of India's GC application... Green cards have a per country cap-- at the end of fiscal year, USCIS can use the "unused" GC quota of other countries for the backlogged countries. This is why you see that "priority date" for India stays at a fixed place (e.g., 2005 for EB2 India) for most of the year, and then suddenly moves forward at the end of fiscal year.
How do you define "sell"? Adsense and Adwords - can very well be argued as selling the distilled gist mined from troves of data collected from your search history, email, photos, android app usage.
Wouldn't high-quality-CMS be important to bring down the cost of publishing-- to the point of determining the sustainability of the publication itself?
The established media companies are struggling, if I had to describe in one line, because contemporary revenues cannot sustain their traditional cost structure.
You would otherwise need staff to coordinate between photographer, and onsite attendee and social media curator finding tweets to go with that story, and generally different parts being curated by different team members.
You also want to optimize the "review" workflow, to maximize the page views by landing the story quickly vs. other publications.
So maybe the best CMS in the world saves you 10% in costs over an averagely competent CMS.
It's not really a material difference in terms of sustainability.
You are correct in stating that established media companies are struggling because of their cost structures. But those cost structures are mostly salaries (and capital investments in buildings etc) rather than something that a magic CMS can fix.
Put it like this: when a "new media journalist" uses their mobile phone to take a picture for their story (instead of a staff photographer) that has made a bigger difference in terms of cost structure than the worlds-best CMS can make.
Hah, that's not jest, that's helpful. I wasn't sure if this was his exact answer or a summary of some other Quora answer, so I didn't bother searching, shame on me :)
The allocation of visas for exceptional talent is surprisingly skewed. Only about 6% of 1 Million green cards issued each year are issued to people who are here for their skills. Rest goes to family based immigration.
This specially hurts engineers on H1B from India and China the most, because of per country limits, they have to wait for close to a decade. e.g., someone from India, who qualifies for the definition of "Exceptional" for EB2 bucket, should have applied in 2005 to get visa this month.
