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.
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.
Suppose Bezos burns 80% of his net worth playing with his willy in his garage and decides to wrap it up. He goes straight back to his cushy HF job, 3 years behind in his career if he can't manage to market his experience as some kind of lofty journey landing him a better role than when he left. Let's not pretend it was brave - he had the foundations to take the risks and still come out just fine.
I said "pretty much". The homelessness crisis in, say, the US, affects a relatively small portion of the population; from quick looking up figures, it's less than 1% of the population.
I'm no expert on any of this, but as far as I understand it, homelessness is usually 1. transitory, and 2. usually tied to other serious issues like mental health issues, drug abuse etc. It's usually not a "lack of resources".
Which really reflects to how most people's parents/family/society is pathetic.
Now I'm not merely talking about a safely net after one burns up millions in a startup but I'm taking about say a safety net after loosing a job etc. I think most people (like me) would be just happy to have stability in life rather than yearn for being financially successful. The precarious existence is depressing.
Yeah an unsurprisingly large percent of self-styled.. self-made billionaires certainly came from close to or actual millionaire backgrounds.
I suppose it shouldn't be terribly surprising as being successful requires hard work & a good idea. But it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.
>it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.
I graduated in 2008, and I watched classmates make the 'insane' decision to risk it all and go off and try to found startups. Inevitably, some failed, but to my shock it wasn't the end of the world for them? In one case the 'bank of mom and dad' paid rent until they got back on their feet, and in the other, they moved into an ADU in their parent's back yard.
That's when it hit me that those folks took risks because they could afford to. I was worried about winding up sleeping under a bridge. That concern was as foreign to them as the thought of having a safety net to fall back on was to me.
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
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.
If you had said "were" instead of "are" this would be a true statement. Since South Dakota v. Wayfair in 2018, states have been allowed to charge sales taxes on businesses that have no operations in their state. That decision overturned 1992's Quill v. North Dakota, which held as you say. But that is no longer the law of the land.
The 5-4 majority in 2018 included two justices who were part of the unanimous holding in 1992 (Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas), voting to overturn their own decision from a quarter century before.
>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.
In 1992, SCOTUS ruled in Quill vs. North Dakota[0] that a business must have a "nexus" in a particular state to be required to collect sales taxes. I'd note that Amazon was founded in 1994.
And so, yes Amazon did have an advantage WRT sales taxes. But it wasn't, as you said, "outright illegal" until 2018 with SCOTUS' ruling in South Dakota vs. Wayfair Inc.[1] At which time, IIRC, Amazon continued collecting sales taxes that it had already been collecting in many states, as already it had nexuses (warehouses, distribution centers, etc.) in many places.
I'd note that I'm not "defending" Amazon here. They do plenty of shady stuff WRT pricing, as well as abusing their employees, suppliers and third-party sellers.
Why don't we take them to task for that stuff instead of making stuff up? Just sayin'
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.
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.
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.
There is a pretty famous story from Saturday Night Live. The characters of the "two Wild and Crazy Guys" were based on an individual Steve Martin met in a bar in New York. He was an immigrant from a country in Eastern Europe and, delightfully inebriated and happy, was crowing about his new life in America. Among the things he mentioned (paraphrasing from memory of Martin describing the anecdote) "In my home country, I am doctor. Now, I sell washing machines. Is much better!"
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.
This is such a good point. People tend to focus on money as the main form of privilege, but that internalized sense of “I belong here” might matter even more. It’s not just confidence—it’s a kind of default assumption that you’ll be taken seriously, that you’ll have options, that failure won’t wreck your life.
I’ve seen it in startups too. Some founders take bold risks because they know, consciously or not, that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll be fine. Others carry the weight of “I can’t afford to screw this up,” and that changes how they operate. Even if they’re equally capable, the emotional cost of risk is just higher when you don’t have that built-in safety net.
And from the outside, those differences are invisible. Both people might succeed, but one was playing on easy mode and didn’t know it. The other had to brute-force their way through every step. That gap is real, and we don’t talk about it enough.
Can't you just as easily make the opposite argument?
Founders that have a safety net have less drive and motivation to give it their all, because they have a safety net. They simply just don't have the same pressure to not fail, because if they do - no biggie.
The founder with no safety net, no real backup, needs to give it his all, because he's doomed if his idea doesn't work out.
I’m not sure you really can, at least not in the way it’s often portrayed. Founders usually need a high level of skill or a clearly transferable capability in something already valuable. That phrase gets repeated a lot, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like an oversimplification. Maybe there’s a version of it that works, but it’s probably more about reframing or uncovering hidden leverage than starting from zero.
Money, education, powerful parents, safety nets, a good upbringing: these things are levers that multiply the work you put into things. I think a lot of people put the maximum effort into their work and lives, but these levers mean that existing privilege will usually result in amplified results for the same input level of effort.
Upbringing, background, mindset, social safety nets (eg knowing that if you fail, you’ll still be fine) — these things are huge and make a huge difference.
But 300k then is about 650k today, and just the time this would buy me alone would mean I’d be able to dedicate my full energy to a few projects that, while I don’t think could ever reach the scale of Amazon, would at least have the potential to make a reasonable return on that initial investment. The 300k is a huge boost that a lot of people don’t have access to.
But you’re absolutely right. If you’re not in the game at all, it’s very difficult to get in, and those other non-financial benefits are a big deal.
> He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously.
This is such a huge part of it. Our upbringing gives us our culture and the set of ideas and expectations that form our "default mode" thinking.
If your default mode assumption is that you are capable and have agency, that investing in a long-term project will reliably produce long-term value, and that risks are often worth taking, you are set up to try to build something amazing.
But if your default mode is that you are a pawn at the whims of other people, that whatever you try to build can be easily swept away by chance or bad actors, and that you've got no room to fail, then at best you'll just try to eke out a stable existence with as little risk taking as possible.
Plus, this isn't just a mindset that people have in their heads, some chip on their shoulder from their upbringing holding them back: It's their actual reality.
Some people do have agency to act, and the assurance that their actions will produce value, and they are in fact not in catastrophic danger. And some people really do not have agency, they are pawns largely under the control of others, and live on a knife's edge where everything they have might be swept away by things entirely outside of their control. These realities shape whether it is even possible to take the risks that are necessary to reach success.
I agree, although in a way that mirrors my opening statement from OP: I think people who don't have this disadvantage tend to underestimate how real it is, and those who have it tend to overestimate how real it is.
> He thought he belonged... he thought he could do things and that people would let him.
This is a good point and, in the case of successful startup entrepreneurs, it may not rely solely on how much society grants or denies that belonging. Entrepreneurs tend toward a kind of selective irrationality in how they see themselves and in how they think others see them. Steve Jobs was always the first victim and/or beneficiary of his own reality distortion field. Internally, this lack of self-awareness would tend to help one ignore some of the emotional downsides of belonging being denied and externally to seize more belonging than is being granted - just through sheer chutzpah.
I've heard it said that many successful startup entrepreneurs feel all the insecurity of 'imposter syndrome' without processing any of the 'imposter' part. They tend to think they belong even when they objectively don't. While irrational, annoying and unhealthy, it's hard to imagine this doesn't have some advantages too.
> Whereas the proverbial Bezos will think about the grit and determination it took to march for decades through treacherous financial and political swamps
I cant help, but these people are frequently the swamp. They fit right in, they create it and they create horrible environment for everyone else.
It’s not just starting advantage, it’s also luck which gets talked about in the blog. You could start with a set of bad cards and still end up being much ahead than someone with good cards, if you have a little bit of luck.
> That you got lucky at a singular moment in history and now you're an old man is not an easy set of facts to accept.
This often gets talked about when we discuss CEOs and Billionaires, but it’s also equally applicable to engineers, managers and directors. You could go to the same college, start at the same company, work the same amount of hours, work similar projects, and bam, one of you gets laid off, the other one gets to see promotions and stock growth. And these successes then compound.
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.
"The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-94 11306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project."
...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.
There's no denying that Bill Gates was highly privileged, but his business acumen and early development achievements were also extraordinary. At least, two great factors combined. We can also include the initial team and cofounder.
Of course, there's many priviliged kids, doesn't take away from Bill's achievements, but all the -from the garage- bs is kinda of a bit of gaslighting to the real middle class no?
I agree that a major issue is the false narrative of equal opportunity and resilience. It's one thing to be resilient when you have a strong network and a safety net. It's entirely different when you're facing a free fall with nothing to catch you.
I mean Bill Gates grandparents were buddies with the Rockerfellers. Even if Gates didn't directly get money from them simply being close to that level of influence and power gives you essentially freedom to print money with very little effort through effortless connections to whatever you need.
Oh you need advice from a $10,000 a day law firm for a difficult business situation? My dads friend John works at "prestigious law-firm" I'll get him to get us some feedback on the situation.
You can't generate prestige tho, only the fake outputs.
In the case of law at least, it is true you can no side-step the 10k fee for a -consultancy- but lawyers and doctors will remain a human guarded work for long imho, at least in the sign-off phase, even if they use these tools to amplify their work
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.
As far as upkeep, most of these lots are already in unimproved land, where everything around is also unimproved. Road access is usually at least there. So, no mandatory upkeep except looking at satellite photos once every couple of months. Some places have tax, I think an average would be maybe $50 a year, if any?
I don't know about little, but I regularly see plots of land (sometimes developed) in remote areas on Facebook Marketplace for really good prices. Or at least prices that seem compelling to me.
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?
He's using the ultimate geriatric investment strategy: Simply being in the way of people and obstructing them, by the virtue of being born earlier. Genius.
Ah yes, the reason that life is a struggle is that there are other people that got here before you lol. Funny thing, there were also people that got here before me, so I’m having a tough time with your logic.
It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago!
So tell me, wise one, at what age do you plan to euthanize yourself? You do know that Logan’s run was a cautionary tale, right?
Every generation builds on the scraps of the last one.
That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible. I do try, not always successfully, to make sure my actions are useful to people. I am pretty sure my land hobby has opened more doors for people than it has closed.
Maybe it is irresponsible to keep a boat on a slip to not be used 99 percent of the time, I’ll give you that. That’s one reason I am no longer owned by a boat.
My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.
Maybe stop looking to others to explain why things aren’t easy.
I love to see deserving people prosper. By deserving, I mean simply people that also love to see people prosper. That’s how we build a world. People that think that the problem with the world is that there are people in it are the actual problem.
> It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago!
Much more recently than this I would say, when abandoned land was given away for free by the government to anybody who wanted it. Almost everywhere in the world, less than a hundred years ago.
Land was not always owned by somebody. I was born in a place which is very sparsely populated. Uninhabited or unused land was considered to not be owned by anybody, until a rotten generation arrived in the 50s-60s and decided that every remote piece of land had to be owned by somebody. Then there was a scramble of which families could lie the most and bribe the most to "prove" that the land was theirs. Now young people cannot live there anymore because they cannot afford to pay 200 years of their wages to have a scrap of land. They either have to be born into the landed gentry or they have to move the fuck out from where their ancestors have lived thousands of years.
> That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible.
But that's exactly what you're doing with abandoned land "investment", if I haven't misunderstood? When somebody actually needs that land, you are there to say "uh-uh, pay the toll first". What other reason would there be to purchase land to leave it abandoned? I have nothing to say against productive investment.
> My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.
That sounds like productive investment.
You buying plots of land out in the sticks is probably not the reason for my problems or for the problems of anybody else, but buying land where people need to live and then just sitting on it for a cash out is one of the most common geriatric investment strategies and has had enormously damaging effects for humanity.
Yeah, it’s not an investment strategy for me. I give them away to people I think can use them or,rarely, leave them in the use of neighbors for some unlikely future use. I generally don’t ever sell land. Except in rare cases, to buy more land.
Well, I did mention that I’m drunk at 3 am, buying land on eBay, right?
A few places I really like and have given to my kids or other family members for a second home spot or recreational getaway.
Two are located in places that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to live in full time, I let the neighbors “rent” them (for a a few pesos a year) to use for farming or whatever. One never knows how the world will shape up, maybe they come in handy. If not, maybe a grandkid can use it.
Others I have undoubtedly forgotten about and have been confiscated for taxes, I suppose.
The value I have seen generated for others by my reckless dalliances are more than worth the cost. I mean, one of the best ones only cost $300.
I could easily spend that on a night out, and no way that is going to fundamentally improve anyone’s life. It’s like gambling for the chance to make someone’s life better.
I have also been known to midnight purchase sailboats in places I want to visit. Sometimes you can get great deals on boats that the owners have left behind. Usually I’ll go there and tinker for a few weeks, enjoying myself and sailor culture, take it out sailing until I want to go home, then sell it for (usually) much more than I paid and I get a free vacation.
A few years ago I bought a 32’ roberts (comfortable, but a bit of a pig in chop) near San Fransisco. She was $900 with a great slip and a flaky outboard. I spent a week getting her in shape, 500 dollars on a one-season racing sail and another 300 getting it recut, bought a few sandbags because she seemed a bit tender with the heavy pilot house, and sailed around the canals for a few days, then spent a week cruising the bay. After that, I spent a few days at the municipal dock, 100 feet from million dollar condos in a fantastic part of town.
Great times and great street culture back then. I hear it has kinda gone downhill?
Anyway, I used it for a “vacation home” for a few years and sold her at a fair but beneficial price.
I’m a little more settled down now, raising a new batch of kids…but if there’s a secret to life, it’s to own land outright, and avoid debt at all cost. Buy it when you’ve earned it. Until then, buy what you can afford to own, where you can afford to live. The compromises you have to make will pay excellent dividends. /grandpa rant
Also ymmv. My advice kinda assumes you aren’t trying to fit into some kind of pre-prepared slot. If you aren’t wanting to take full responsibility for yourself and your life, and the resultant outcome, my advice is probably bad.
Half application of good advice is usually worse than no advice at all. I should mention that I’m basically hardcore unemployable because of my attitudes in life, and for the short periods of time that I have been an employee, I have been a poor one.
If you aren’t looking for the path of high resistance, you should probably write me off as a crackpot geezer.
I had to build my own shelter security and ensure my own food security as of 16, but yes, i did have that advantage growing up, and as I saw it essential to have and possible to create myself, I did so.
Those things are achievable IF you are willing to give up luxuries that you may see as essential. (the kind of job you want, comfort, etc). But if you are willing to forgo those things for a few years , you can build a resource base so that you will never have to be worried about those things ever again in your life. You will always have a fallback.
The main thing you get from having a "place", even if you don't live there, but a place... is the ability to tolerate risk. Without risk tolerance, there are very few ways forward where you do not exist at the charity of someone or something you cannot control - a life where inherently you are forced to work for priorities that are not your own, and be placated by trappings of wealth that you do not really have.
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.
> I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that"
No matter how wealthy or poor your Western European upbringing may have been, being saddled with that worldview is, IMHO, the worst kind of disadvantage someone in otherwise fairly good circumstances can have because it's baked into your skull and how you see everything. I hope you've been able to overcome it.
Just check eBay. If you want it to turn out good, it’s best to go and see. If we’re talking about $1200 parcels, it costs more to vet than to buy. Just look it over and judge the best you can on the information you can gather, and accept the 30 percent risk that it won’t be what you expected in some way or another. Or, go there. Not worth paying a title agency or any of that crap. Be sure of any tax burden (easily researched) and what the annual taxes, if any , will be.
Do you have more advice for finding land to buy other than using ebay?
I've been looking for a while for a few acres of unimproved/secluded/wooded land within an hour or two drive away from me here in Kansas, mostly just for bushcrafting or tooling around. The only place I really know to check is Zillow, and while there are a few listings in my distance range, they're typically upwards of $10k/acre. I just checked ebay and saw parcels priced much closer to what I'd expect for unimproved land out in the middle of nowhere, but I couldn't find any in my middle of nowhere, just several states away.
I'm pretty sure there's tons of completely unused land all over the place here that people would be willing to get rid of for cheap, but I have no idea how to find those people. I've considered just going to every small town within an hour of me and posting a "will buy" ad on whatever bulletin boards I'm allowed to post stuff on, but for now I'm still holding out hope that there's a better way. Tips?
An absurd amount of land is held by people that don't even know it. They aren't looking to sell generally. Lots of inherited and placed in trusts over generations.
Use q public, or whatever is in your area and search for land recently acquired by an estate. Pretty much that means the owner died, there was no clear line of inheritance do typically a distant relative or random person is selling the estate. Try to buy it.
The other is legal notices and government bid sites. You can buy tax owed land, laws vary by state.
Well, the trick to finding it cheap is to not look for anything/anywhere specific, so I doubt I can help with that. It’s not that I am good at it, it’s that when I’m momentarily bored, I’m not in a picky mood. If it’s cheap and I can imagine a life there, no matter how humble, and it makes me smile, then my wife is probably going to be asking me questions I don’t have good answers for and I’m going to have to work on a reasonable explanation that doesn’t sound like I’ve finally gone off the deep end.
It’s pretty much all eBay for me or local equivalents in other countries. So many rabbit holes.
It beats playing the lottery. And it makes a fun excuse to go places. Low expectations are your friend, that way you get pleasant surprises instead of disappointment.
All part of my strategy of success through lowered expectations. Im finding that this decade has made me an accidental optimist lol, but these days I can pontificate well insulated from the outcome.
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.
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
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)
Nah, I'll correct the record because anyone who worked hard enough absolutely had access to "that level of resources"
My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.
Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.
Having a garage isn't enough. A lot of people with garages need to work everyday to pay for their garage, and food, and everything else. Bezos and Jobs both had free garages and free time paid for by their parents. I would bet the others mentioned in the post had the same sort of freebies.
Is the contrapositive also true? If Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos had been dirt poor in childhood rather than solidly middle class, would they not have had success? I.e. how much weight should we put on the things out of their control vs within their control?
It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have
People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's
not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity
Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel
Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig
And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place
Few would suggest anyone having time, a place, necessities covered well enough, and few distractions is going to be ensured success.
But with those things, someone who also has ideas, insights, a strong work ethic (or often much better, a strong natural enthusiasm for something useful) has much better chances.
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.
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.
Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper?
There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.
I think the false equivalence is in your very comment, the point GP is making is that everyone is flipping the coin, just that one guy will get heads 100 times in a row, and the vast majority of people won't.
There is only but so much room in the capital ecosystem for billionaires, even when you factor in creation of wealth through resource-extraction and refinement or labor.
We hear much from the Jobs and Gates of society, and little from the other garage-folk who just didn't make it: they ran out of time, ran out of steam, ran out of funding, or were doing something that would have worked great and made them billionaires if Apple hadn't hit the market three months sooner than them.
Billionaires in garages are a confirmation-bias story.
Everyone starts with something, the guy in the trailer park is thousands times better off than the guy in the savannah. But an average person in USA starts out with a garage, that isn't a high bar.
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.
Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources.
Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.
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.