[avg_dev]

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this:

> As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park.

Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

[mandevil]

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

[jimmydddd]

Unpopular take. While I agree with the sentiment, I still think it took some fortitude to walk away from the golden handcuffs of a successful finance career to do an Internet startup at that time. Bezos said he ran the idea past his boss at the time, and the boss said something like "that's a good idea, but not for someone who already has a great job like you." So I do applaud him for that. Bloomberg made a similar transition.

[Gud]

Also his granddad was loaded.

[bsder]

It also overlooks the fact that what Amazon was doing was outright illegal for years and they never got handed their ass on a platter.

For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax.

Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly illegal behavior to become big.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

And he comes from a well off family.

[jgalt212]

He also drove a car cross-country to a new city to seek his fortune to leave his current city where he was already on his way to building a small fortune. sour grapes.

[ryandrake]

I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.

[threatofrain]

From the immigrant perspective that was true for many, coming from another country where any status in the US is better. They may be privileged from the perspective of others who couldn't make it out, but from the US perspective it's something different.

[pmichaud]

I think in conversations like these most people on the successful side underestimate how valuable the starting advantages were, and most people not on the successful side overestimate how valuable the starting advantages were. Meanwhile almost everyone misunderstands what the advantages really are.

People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do anything!" meanwhile millions of people with much more than that fritter it away on nothing, even if they are trying not to. It takes something more to be Bezos.

Whereas the proverbial Bezos will think about the grit and determination it took to march for decades through treacherous financial and political swamps, and think "would I have let a lack of an initial 300k stop me from even starting? Would I have failed to secure the capital and cooperation without that seed? Given the heroics I've pulled over the years? Hell no, that wouldn't have stopped me."

But here's the part that most people misunderstand. The 300k is a small advantage, it might have made a difference, and some cases might make THE difference, but it's only the most concrete, obvious advantage. The real thing is like this:

In my earliest memories I was pretty poor, but also in those memories both my parents were going to university, while my dad was packing fiberglass at a factory. Then they graduated and he got a job and we became suburban middle class, my dad staying at his big corporation for the rest of his life, while my mom more or less stayed at home although she went back to school and ended up about half way through a PhD program. I would think about what career I wanted as a child, and what school I might go to, that sort of thing.

Fast forward to my first wife who I met when I was 17. She is self described "british ghetto trash," and she emigrated because she couldn't escape her accent, in a phrase. She taught me what I didn't know about privilege, at a time before that was a term anyone was using for this purpose. The reality she knew in the council housing (ie projects) where she grew up was that her dad was a scam artist flake who floated in and out of her life without regard for the many promises he made, and whenever he pulled off a big one he'd show up and splash a little cash around before running off again. He was far from ashamed, he was a "2 types of people in this world!" type scammer. Her mom wasn't much better, basically scamming the government for benefits, working whatever angle she could but never actually "working working."

My ex never thought about careers or schools or anything. She thought about what scam she could pull to make it to next month. It was a weird series of events that brought her across the pond, and into university and beyond.

That's what Bezos had that my ex didn't have. He thought he belonged inside society, he thought he could do things and that people would let him. He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously. The same for her but opposite, the idea of participating in society at all, never mind changing it was utterly foreign to her experience.

I think it was crushingly more important than the 300k in terms of pivotal advantages. It sucks to start with bad cards, but it's much tougher to not be in the game in the first place.

[the_snooze]

Silicon Valley itself came about in no small part due to direct government support: Fairchild Semiconductor selling chips for weapons targeting, ARPANET leading to the Internet, Sergei Brin and Larry Page's PhD's very likely funded by NSF and other federal funders.

And now you have Silicon Valley "leaders" looking to tear down the public institutions that seeded the place.

[nonrandomstring]

...and billions of taxpayer dollars, hundreds of years of European science, standing on the shoulders of giants, thousands of years of Greek, Arabic and Far Eastern mathematics.... The "self-made industrialist" sketch is funny when it's Monty Python, but when I hear whining SV bros claiming they built an empire from a rolled-up-newspaper, it's so avoidantly ungrateful. Like some kid "divorces" their own parents, disowns their lineage and declares themselves a unique and special self-creation. The US would do well to reconnect its Native American culture and have more respect for what got everyone here.

[tough]

Look into bill gates mom ;)

[K0balt]

This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time.

Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.

Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.

My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.

They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.

Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.

By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.

But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.

You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.

You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.

Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.

Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.

I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.

Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.

[thomassmith65]

That really deserves its own post. It's too interesting to be left as a comment.

I have a lot of questions... who sells plots of land for that little money? Are there tax implications? Does anyone ever get on your case for upkeep?

You really should write a blog post. It definitely would hit the front page.

Edit

  who sells plots of land for that little money?

Apparently: many people! I just did a web search. Little plots of land are much cheaper than I expected

[ryandrake]

How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?

[readthenotes1]

Food and shelter security, famuky that was inclined to help more than hurt.

That's your main privilege...

[Roritharr]

This is gut-wrenching to read from Germany.

I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that" and had to slowly break out of it as much as I could. Just knowing that there's people like you out there makes me happy. I applaud your freedom.

[moondistance]

Where do you find/buy land? How do you vet purchases? Can you point to a few websites, etc.? Thanks!

[foobarian]

... I think I just found my new hobby! :-D

[dabockster]

Ain't no garages in low rise apartments either. I'm really believing now that the lack of hard science startups in the past decade+ is a byproduct of the US housing crisis. No single family home with a garage, no space to physically put a server.

[no_wizard]

would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines

[monknomo]

What I took from it is that the story about starting a company in a garage is about the humble origins.

But to start a company in a garage you must have access to a garage; lots of people do not have this level of resources. The origins of these companies are not as humble as they sound, they rely access to resources that are not actually common (unless you look from the POV of a well-offish 'middle class' family)

[PeterFBell]

If you live with your parent in a double wide in a trailer park and need to work at the local Target every night since high school to make enough money to help pay for groceries for the family, you might have a harder time working 100 hour weeks on the off chance that you'll raise a round and start a company. You probably also don't know many VC's or live too close to where they hang out.

Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.

[ryandrake]

It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.

[indoordin0saur]

These successes come from the middle-class, not the working classes. You could take it further and note that even just owning a home as a young person isn't really attainable for the middle-class anymore. Things were simply easier back then.

[masfuerte]

It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.

[boringg]

What are you trying to imply - sounds like your trying to make a broad but vague statement.

[mensetmanusman]

Ain’t no trailer parks without engineers and mechanics designing trailers.

Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.

[twen_ty]

That also created the biggest singular transfer of wealth. So your argument is that the peasants are no longer starving and well fed. If that's the ambition level you're happy to live by then there's no further comment.

[kevinventullo]

Whoosh