[nostrademons]

There are a few examples of startup founders who were potentially homeless if it failed (AirBnB is the obvious one...they started it because they were literally a month away from being homeless), but you're right, this is the exception rather than the rule.

I think what's frequently overlooked in the "how do I get the resources to found a startup without risking everything?" is that you don't do it in one shot. If you have zero in the bank, your first priority should be to get six months of living expenses in the bank, and that usually means taking a job and saving 25% of your paycheck for two years. Then once you have six months in the bank, your next priority should be to get 3 years of savings in the bank, and that usually means taking a better job and saving 50% of your paycheck for 3 years. Only once you've got about 3 years saved up are you really in a position to found a startup without having run across seed funding from an angel.

Few people really understand compound interest or how it works out in practice. It's not just about putting money in a bank account or index fund and letting it grow. It's about having successively larger cash cushions so you can take bigger risks with better risk/reward trade-offs.

[akg_67]

> AirBnB is the obvious one...they started it because they were literally a month away from being homeless

How much of this statement is real and how much is just a marketing narrative put together afterward to make project look better or humanize? I see this over and over in every segment.

I laugh every time I read that an investment/asset manager claims to had a paper route or lemonade stand and.or bought 1 stock and suddenly wanted to be an investment/ asset manager.

[nostrademons]

I suspect the answer is "Yes" and "Yes", but I wasn't there for AirBnB's founding so I don't know for sure. It'd be interesting to get mwseibel's perspective on this because he was there, at least once the company got into YC.

Anyway, you bring up a good point about facts vs. narrative, and how we weave a narrative around the facts that puts a particular spin on it. Among startup founders I do personally know - they seem to be essentially randomly-sampled from the top half of the income distribution. There are not many who were outright poor (although you can always find exceptions), but a lot who come from middle-class backgrounds, many more than those who come from upper-class backgrounds. It's not really that startups are a game for the 1%, it's that they're a game for the 50%.

I'd also like to counterpoint that the same distinction between facts vs. narrative happens when people explain their own life stories. Many people take the facts of their life and then weave them together as "well, if only I were born rich, things would be very different". This is trivially true, but also not really a narrative I find useful; I would much rather focus on the things that I can control having made my life what it is, rather than the things out of my control.

[boomzilla]

The AirBnB story about `literally a month from being homeless` is total BS. Both Chesky and Gebbia worked for a few years before starting the company and the other guy went to Harvard.

[koolkatkool]

Was airbnb a month away from being evicted or a month away from asking their parents for another deposit?

Lots of rich kids play at being poor all the while knowing they can call home at any point.

[nostrademons]

I don't know the family situation of the AirBnB founders personally, but Wikipedia says both of them were social workers, which isn't exactly what most people would consider a rich kid background.

I'm always a bit perplexed by the people who come out of the woodwork to say that startups are a rich kid's game, though. What's the family background of folks on this site? I understand that there's a wide variety of socioeconomic statuses on the Internet, and that wealth is relative and 50% of Americans have zero in savings. But is there actually a huge HN population whose families are worse-off than social workers (Brian Chesky), seed & clothing factory workers (Marc Andreesen), mechanics (Steve Jobs), engineers (Steve Wozniak), college professors (Larry Page), or refugees (Sergey Brin, Jan Koum)?

I come from a single-earner (elementary school teacher) family, and usually think of myself as smack in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum. I could and did move back home after college, but then, a lot of children also have that privilege. Do the demographics of HN skew so much poorer that most folks here do not have parental households they could go back to?

[Karrot_Kream]

- Chesky: Working for 4 years before founding AirBnB.

- Andreesen: Dual-income family, though details about his parents are scant.

- Jobs: Dual income family at a time when the vast majority of families had a single income.

- Wozniak: Engineers make a lot of money.

- Page: Professors do too

- Brin: Father is professor at University of Maryland, Mother is a researcher at NASA's Goddard.

- Koum: Had been working in industry for 15 years before starting his own company.

So yes, most people in the US have backgrounds much worse than this.

[imesh]

Yeah, your parents don't need to even be middle class in order for you to move back in with your parents, your parents just need to exist and be willing to let you back. In fact loads of poor people live with their parents...