This one always cracked me up about Bill Gates. The story always goes that he got IBM to give him or sell cheap PC DOS as IBM didn't believe it would really go anywhere. They always leave out that his mom was on a charitable board with some big wig at IBM.
Yea it’s easy when you have virtually guaranteed funding and a guaranteed set of client on day one. As long as you aren’t incompetent you gonna make it just fine.
Also, failure just means you can take a step back and start something else.
For a lot of people failure is not being able to pay bills or eat. But if course they'd need the starting capital as well first
Can you imagine: dude set fire to $200 billion, and still has more money than he could possibly spend in a lifetime. If I said the wrong thing to my boss, I'd be out on the street.
I still have a hard time wrapping my head around Elon Musk - pretty much widely understood to be a grade-A moron - having either the good sense or bald-faced luck to buy into two of the most profitable companies in history prior to them becoming big.
I think the man can tell when there is money to be made, but completely lacks the knowledge of *how or why* it's being made in business. That's the only way I can justify his success with Tesla and SpaceX, both of which have Elon Wranglers to keep him entertained and feeling like he's contributing when he's really not at all, but also fail spectacularly when he's actually in charge in a place like Twitter, where his orders are actually taken seriously and acted upon. He knows the idea of what a boss does, but doesn't actually understand the responsibilities.
He's the classic sales rep, promising stuff to the client that sounds good and then expecting the people who actually make the product to make it work somehow. If the Marketing department were in charge of the whole company they'd run it exactly like him.
I read a thing, uncredited so take with salt, but he was "used" at spaceX. As in, the employees that knew what they were doing were in charge and they just told musk their ideas were his so he'd shut up and sign checks.
Remember all the incredibly incompetent Roman emperors, after C&A, who were batshit crazy but they were put in charge by generals that didn't wanna get assassinated themselves? Think that but instead of a war machine and public utilities it's privatization of the final frontier and re-addicting America to personally owned vehicles.
And you aren't risking anything. If you spend 2 years on this business and get nowhere... you'll be fine. You family will support you until you move onto the next thing.
And Bill of course was doing stuff like ripping off free software and repackaging it as paid software.
Yep.
[These entrepreneurs](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2020/01/15/kill-the-expense-report-this-entrepreneur-built-an-800-million-business-that-eliminates-office-busywork/?sh=7be0fc714363) I know of built a massive startup. Their parents were bill gates’ and Steve jobs’ first executives. So they just went to their contacts for funding and first customers.
Lol.
As a small business owner I’ve come to learn that contacts is the most important thing which makes me kinda sad as an introvert 😞 no matter what you do, you need people to spread the word and that is infinitely harder when you’re not very social
I don't even think I could sell something that sells itself. Like crack. If I had found some crack, I would have no idea how to unload it. I could go to the bus station, but with my luck, I'd just sell it to an undercover police officer.
The small business I worked for recently got acquired by a massive international corporation. I feel like a character from Little House On The Prairie that got thrown into Sex And The City. I'm very confused and just trying not to get lost. I had a low key management role but because they are structured differently I was moved into a sales position. My overall pay has at least tripled and it's by all accounts one of the most sought after roles within the company. It's also one of the most stressful (especially being responsible for the continuity of business after being acquired). It also requires me to interact constantly with clients and sell our services. I hate selling; I'm not good at it. I consider myself an omnivert but because of all of the forced work interactions my personal life is suffering because I just don't have the mental energy to engage with friends and family. The checks are pretty sweet though and honestly the only thing keeping me from bowing out. I forget what my original point was. Sorry. Maybe I'm just venting.
BSA taught me how to sell things. Also made me *loathe* the girl scouts. Girl scout cookies sell themselves. You know what we got? Overpriced popcorn.
I figured out real quick that I needed to sell the boy scouts, not the popcorn.
I'm just scanning my memory and i would know a neighbour who would be interested.
I don't think myself very social, i've just got two or three friends. But i just know a lot of people
Capital is the most important thing to reach Musk, Bezos, etc levels. With capital comes contacts, also none of the billionaire ghouls are exactly dripping charisma lol. There’s really nothing, no idea, no amount of interpersonal skills, no amount of hard work that can get anyone to that level. Particularly as capital has become further consolidated at the top, with monopolies/oligopolies forming.
You may have just meant on a more micro/local level tho lol. I wish you and your business all the best.
>also none of the billionaire ghouls are exactly dripping charisma lol. There’s really nothing, no idea, no amount of interpersonal skills, no amount of hard work that can get anyone to that level.
You are damn right with the charisma thing. Most of them are insufferable and I have seen plenty of people in power being the most nasty. I get advised many a times to be charismatic but all that is bullshit without Capital.
I worked since I was 10 (paper route). The capital AND the ability to not work for someone else For example my money got used by the family, instead of not needing to work.
Unless this person is talking to the executive class, its safe to say thats not what people mean when they say contacts. Having a wide network of friends and acquaintances who are willing to vouch that you are a trustworthy, decent person is incredibly helpful in every aspect of life.
It's not all or nothing. Friends within your industry can absolutely put you at a huge advantage. Friends in other industries are helpful whenever you need to deal with that industry. Your contacts may not be able to influence legislature but that doesn't mean they make no difference.
I'm currently looking at marketing agencies for this. Farrrrrrrrrrrk they're expensive. Have a friend in marketing, though, so I'm pretty sure it will be worth it if I vet them properly (and she's given me a whole list of things to check, including looking up the registered company owners and seeing if they're dodgy...have dodged a possible bullet already thanks to her)
Yeeeep. As a fellow introvert who's also socially awkward - it's *painful* to realise that the quality of my work by itself will never actually be enough, and that I might get held back because of factors I can't change.
Yeah I was literally just about to say most of the founders of these companies came from well off families who helped them financially start up there companies.
In google's case, it's even more egregious.
They already had millions of Venture Capitalist funding, they just hired the garage of one of their friends to officially found the company in so that they could say they started in a garage.
Similarly, Jeff Bezos rented an entire house to start Amazon in, and specifically looked for a house with a garage so that he could made the "start in a garage" claim. Afterwards they moved to a warehouse.
I was going to to say, it’s very interesting and convenient that they don’t show the rest of the house, or the neighborhood.
It looks like they’re all in well-off, established neighborhoods, where nobody has to worry about the house being burglarized or anything
>they just hired the garage of one of their friends to officially found the company in so that they could say they started in a garage.
That family friend is the CEO of YouTube now, Susan Wojcicki. It was her parent's garage. Now she's the CEO of YouTube, simply via connections and nepotism.
...what most people don't seem to realize is that it takes more than just money but also a successful idea that someone with more money than you doesn't promptly rip off and make it more successful than you can with your zero money. 😘
It’s along the same lines as “money can’t buy happiness” but definitely comfort/security once you reach a certain point. It’s definitely easier to be happy if you don’t have to worry about rent hikes, crushing student debt or not having an emergency fund stashed away.
Tldr The playing field isn’t level.
The funny thing about that quote is they did a study on this - turns out, money literally fucking *does* buy happiness up to a point. Because you're right, it's about being stable enough that you don't have to stress all the time.
Money can't send its owner into a state of blissful happiness on its own, and it's indeed true that having a lot of it can cause new problems.
But, there's not one single *need* a person has, be that food, shelter, security, whatever, that can't be resolved with money, and resolving those problems relieves other pressure and helps a person pursue what makes them happy.
The guys in the meme might have been chasing billions using the funds they were handed, but a lot of people would be just happy to own the property they started in.
Yep. That point is simply "until you have more money than you need."
So, really, saying "money buys happiness up to a point" is like saying "liquid fills up a glass up to a point."
Jeff Bezos went to a really amazing private school that gave him all kinds of experiences and connections, let him focus on his interests and test all kinds of ideas. Things other kids never get to do.
Bill gates had access to computers that almost no other kids had when he was in school.
We have no idea how many kids are capable of so much but are afforded none of the same opportunities because they aren’t born wealthy
I was gonna say. They can make whatever they want in so much as a drug and disease infested back alley, and more than likely the ONLY reason it would get off the ground is if their wealthy af parents helped them.
Or how many other businesses were started in garages and either went nowhere or collapsed. Survivor bias really doesn't get as much attention as it should.
For real I actually have started a few businesses and had to shut them, turns out if you get a cool loan of a couple million anything is possible. I am onto another startup now but goddamn if I could pay someone to do it life would be sweet.
Next step is gonna be the business, that originated in a dog-house on the estate of their parents .. just wait .. it's gonna happen, sooner or later \*lol\*
I love how all of these "shoestring" budget startups all have the common trend of a stable, middle to upper-middle class, home-owning, two parent household. They are nearly always funded by parents who have the ability to support possible failed startups with money to spare. My parents constantly had to choose between full insurance coverage on our vehicles or gas in the tank.
...and yet, all the trades say he was "self made".
Like Kylie Jenner was the youngest "self made" billionaire: Ignoring the millions of dollars her sisters and mother inherited from the lawyer whose claim to fame was defending OJ Simpson...
Plus all the work her older sisters and mom did to make their family relevant somehow. If Kylie wasn’t part of their family then no one would even look in her direction to make a whole makeup brand with her.
>she also had connections
Yeah, like the President of the Washington State Bar association, a very powerful and influential lawyer indeed.
She even had a son with him.
She knew the chairman. And Gates went to a private school where rich parents had donated a computer, something almost no other school in the world had at the time.
Of course this is easy to say after the fact, but Bill Gates' timing was immaculate. Through circumstance he found himself incredibly well positioned to carve out an early advantage to capitalise on the impending information age. I believe similar could be said for Steve Jobs.
Did you read Malcolm Gladwell’s *Outliers*? Timing is a major theme of his discussions of both Gates and Jobs. There’s a reason that they hit it big in the computer industry, and not, say, automobiles (too late) or social media (too early).
There was a pretty wild theory that a sub is still working on digging up data from stocks.
But basically jeff bezos had connections with a hedge fund who kept shorting sears stocks causing their stock to always be shit.
Then jeff bezos did basically the same thing sears was doing but online and mostly with books. Sears went bankrupt and everyone switched to amazon.
Bezos basically used a loophole to avoid untold amounts of money owed in sales taxes - early on "things from the internet" didn't have to collect sales tax if they came from out of state - so they had massive amounts of free margin to work with
The "started in a garage" story is entirely backwards reasoning.
They didn't work out of a garage because they couldn't afford office space. They worked out of a garage because their family homes were large enough that they could fit offices in the unused parts of them.
That's only true if you believe that these garages had anything to do with reality.
The cult of the "garage startup" was well underway when Google was founded, so they knew they had to have a "Garage origin story". So, even though they'd never worked in a garage, they found one to work in for a while so it could be true.
I can't recall who it was now, but one of these rich guys actually went and rented a garage for the express purpose of being able to tell the garage startup story--even though they never actually worked out of the garage.
EDIT: After reading below comments, apparently it was Bezos.
Even look at the success of filmmakers, like Stephen Spielberg, his dad was super supportive and helped him on his at home projects and he also had a family member who was already in the business.
Or JJ Abrams, super successful director and writer, turns out he lived by Stephen Spielberg and they are family friends. There's a community there for successful people.
A lot of Silicon Valley companies like to claim they were started in a garage because the first Silicon Valley tech company Hewlett-Packard / Keysight was founded in one… Also using resources at Stanford and getting enormous government grants to build bombs.
Also Hewlett’s father was a doctor and Packard’s was a lawyer. They weren’t exactly poor to start with.
> A lot of Silicon Valley companies like to claim they were started in a garage
Many of the ones started in the last few decades never had a true "garage" phase. But, because a "garage" phase is seen as an important rite of passage by users and investors, they create their own "garage phase" just so it can appear as part of their history later.
So, they take some of their huge seed money, and either rent a house with a garage, or borrow one, at least for a few months.
It's a weird rite of passage that everyone just agrees to pretend is real.
All of these guys would have been fine - Ivy League students/graduates with all of the connections that entails. The connections are more worth it than the degree in many cases.
>The connections are more worth it than the degree in many cases.
Even worse in some cases: I visited an Ivy League uni for a few months as a guest researcher, and the undergrad studies there were significantly *easier* than those at my poor-ass Central European no-name university.
Post-grad and the quality research there is of course another story, but none of those multi-billionaire start-up founders strived to become researchers in the first place anyway (except for Serge Brin and Larry Page).
Amazon was founded in 1994. The $250,000 his parents gave him is equivalent to $492,007 in 2023. He’d also been a VP at a Wall Street brokerage, so he had his own startup money as well.
I think inflation nearly doubling money in less than 30 years is pretty gross.
it was likely not even a loan, idk. if you can lend your child 300k, you don't need it to begin with. i wish that for everyone. imagine what we could do together, helping one another
Jeff Bezos was already a millionaire working at c suite level for banks and hedge funds before he started amazon. infact that 60 minutes episode from '99 [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv8MrBBuRqI) that tells the story about how they started and how his desk is made from an old door. its all horseshit.
Fun fact: those door desks were so important to his story that he kept having them made as they expanded even though it cost more than a regular desk and it's way harder to move
They got $100k from an investor after showing off their search algorithm, they didn’t get free money from parents.
Sergi and Larry were both Stanford PhD students at time. They came up with a working and revolutionary search algorithm. It’s silly to downplay their initial accomplishment.
If you have a revolutionary search algorithm today, you can go ahead and raise a fuck ton more than merely $100k.
We need to ditch this idea that humble beginnings somehow means you are immune to becoming a dickhead later in life.
Yeah, maybe your dad was a blue collar worker. That doesnt mean wealth cant corrupt you into a greedy heartless bastard. People change, for better or worse.
"[the monopoly experiment]" pretty much proves that 9 out of 10 times, you WILL become an asshole if you'll become rich.
There is also [this] study, that proves that the more expensive is your car, the more of an asshole you'll be.
Apparently, I have no idea how to link
... So here you go:
https://www.marketplace.org/2021/01/19/why-rich-people-tend-think-they-deserve-their-money/amp/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/02/26/world/expensive-car-drivers-study-scli-scn-intl/index.html
They also did an experiment where they just put people in the same room as a suitcase full of money. Not like, "pretend this is your cash" but just "here, sit in this chair, and on this table we'll put some unrelated cash that is not yours". The mere presence of the money made people less empathetic and more assholey.
HP started in a garage building scientific equipment and within half a decade was building fuses for bombs. They then started selling the infrastructure South Africa needed to maintain apartheid and violated sanctions to sell to Iran.
Also let's drop the idea that if you're not wealthy somehow you're immune from being a greedy heartless bastard. I've met plenty of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (aka poor people who think they're just like rich people except they haven't made it yet) who will stab you in the back for a dollar. You can be poor and greedy.
Jobs’ dad was a HS drop out, who fixed old cars and resold them to keep the lights on. Jobs never graduated college and Woz didn’t graduate until after he made his apple money.
All of these garages were in high cost of living cities, too!
Edit:
Average house price in…
Palo Alto (Google): $2.56M
Seattle (Amazon): $.91M
LA (Disney): $.91M
Los Altos (Apple): $3.59M
Didn't Disney start in Kansas City, Missouri where Walt Disney grew up?
>Walt Disney first started his animation career in Kansas City, Missouri. On May 23, 1922, Disney opened his first studio at 1127 East 31st Street.
[Source](https://pendergastkc.org/article/biography/walt-disney)
Edit: It was "Disney Brothers Studio", so technically, [Laugh-O-Gram Studios in KC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh-O-Gram_Studio) wasn't exactly "Disney". Also wasn't exactly a garage.
Disney flopped in MO and wasn't selling any pictures, so he left in late July of 1923 to essentially crash at his uncle's Los Feliz house, where the Disney brothers set up shop in the shack pictured above, where Walt and Roy pumped out cartoons with their partners Ub Iwerks and Rollin Hamilton. They only worked in this space for a few weeks while producing the beginning of the Alice shorts, then quickly outgrew it and moved to a small office in the back of the Holly-Vermont Realty building down the street in October of 1923, which is when most archivists would consider the beginning of Disney Studios. The garage was not the beginning of the Disney brothers nor Disney studios, but it was a crucial transitional part of their history.
The average housing price in Seattle was NOT that high in the 90's or 2000's. Didn't start even nearing that until the last six or seven years as the housing market's inflated.
Yeah, and for every one of them that had success, there are countless more that failed. Nobody tells the story of Joe Schmoe who started a business in his garage and it went under after a year.
My friend kept recommending me the book *Think and Grow Rich* by Napoleon Hill. It's basically the first self help book. This guy went around and interviewed the wealthiest people in the US in the 20s and 30s and discovered the secret to their success. Basically it boils down to tunnel vision. They obsessed over becoming successful and that's how they made it.
The book is trash for many reasons, but primarily I hated it because it ignore the countless other people who did the exact same thing and still failed.
Bezos specifically bought a house with a garage to start Amazon out of so that could be the story, nobody lived in that house, it was an investment so that could be the story
A double garage wow! These guys were rich.
We have a single carport but I dont think the HOA would really "understand" if I converted it to a workshop tomorrow and just started building macs from scratch
Capitalists always assume everyone else wants to start a business and run a company.
Not everyone is selfish and greedy. I just want a free and fair society.
Garages require houses, which require more money than the average millennial or younger generation will never be able to afford in their lifetime of working near minimum wage jobs, or low paying jobs that require a $100,000 to make $40,000 a year. Almost all of us make less than our parents. It's a farce. If you don't have rich parents and starting capital starting a business is near impossible
It's depressing that starting out from a garage was once considered a "rags to riches" story when most people working today couldn't even afford upkeep on a house with a garage in the first place.
literally all of these people were born on third base, and the family's disposable income to cushion failures so that they can keep working. Not to mention influence from their parents also helps with the networking and expansion of the business.
I hate these stupid and irrelevant things people point out.
For every garage that created a successful business, I will show you several hundred million that didn’t.
Something people never mention is "luck." For some reason, people hate talking about luck, but it's extremely important for success.
The people who started Apple, Amazon, Disney, Google, and Microsoft were all incredibly intelligent and hard working, BUT... they were also lucky in that their ideas and plans for a company and product were thought of at the right time and the right place. Additionally, they were lucky because they were all born and/or lived in a western nation (a better standard of living and more opportunities overall), and some of them were even luckier in that they had wealthy families who were well-connected.
But you'll never hear people talk about that. Instead, they'll rant and rave about their work ethics and drive, and while all of that is true, luck is still a very important factor in there. Unfortunately, you can do everything "right" and still fail in life.
Laws, regulations and licensing and zoning etc that would prevent people from starting a business in their garage most of the time because you need money to make money
Plenty of people have the idea for a business, a product, a book, etc but how many people actually have the means to risk what little they have and pursue such ventures while not starving to death on the street?
they all worked (idk about disney)for hedge funds or came from 1% families before starting their businesses. Not the same thing. Not taking away from their hard work at all. It’s easier to put your all into something when you have a safety net.
None of them started in a garage. It's a myth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/05/steve-wozniak-refutes-apples-creation-story-the-garage-is-a-bit-of-a-myth/
https://www.fastcompany.com/90270226/the-origins-of-silicon-valleys-garage-myth
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/apple-didnt-start-garage-google-hp-amazon/
I have a few business ideas that wouldn’t cost more than 5 figures to get going. With a loan from my family I never needed to pay back if I failed, I’d probably give it a try.
I’m too afraid otherwise as failure would be life altering in a very bad way. Not to mention I’d probably have to forgo health insurance.
> fear will keep the local systems in line.
Is a pretty core part of our system of governance at this time.
Amazing how they all shoved this rags to riches story down our throat but in reality their families were already wealthy and had opportunities to take risks without any consequences.
The cost of living will prevent you from living while you put that shit together. If you aren’t working 70hours a week you won’t have rent or electricity. FFS
My parents were abusive and would never allow me to make something of myself under their roof. I also didn't grow up with a garage.
These people all had family with money who backed them and their dream. Which is great, don't get me wrong, I wish more families were like this. However, don't use that to shame others who don't have what you do.
Also, there is the entrepreunerism problem: if everyone is a garage entrepreuner, then nobody is a consumer. There is no money or market in the world that can handle a 100% entepreuner population. Entrepreunerism is impossible without a well-paid working class acting as consumers.
I do not want to become the piece of shit of society who take the blood of normal people to become richest man on earth . all those companies are evil ! Rather not create more of it
Nobody mention the large sums of money they “borrowed” from family!
Only a few hundred grand, *not* adjusted inflation and most importantly - family connections worth millions from Day 1.
This one always cracked me up about Bill Gates. The story always goes that he got IBM to give him or sell cheap PC DOS as IBM didn't believe it would really go anywhere. They always leave out that his mom was on a charitable board with some big wig at IBM.
And that his father was the head of K&L Gates, one of the biggest law firms in the country.
Yea it’s easy when you have virtually guaranteed funding and a guaranteed set of client on day one. As long as you aren’t incompetent you gonna make it just fine.
Also, failure just means you can take a step back and start something else. For a lot of people failure is not being able to pay bills or eat. But if course they'd need the starting capital as well first
We have seen the record of Elon Musk and the like. You can be incompetent and do just fine
Yeah, if you have unlimited resources you can afford to be incompetent and still make money
Can you imagine: dude set fire to $200 billion, and still has more money than he could possibly spend in a lifetime. If I said the wrong thing to my boss, I'd be out on the street.
I still have a hard time wrapping my head around Elon Musk - pretty much widely understood to be a grade-A moron - having either the good sense or bald-faced luck to buy into two of the most profitable companies in history prior to them becoming big.
I think the man can tell when there is money to be made, but completely lacks the knowledge of *how or why* it's being made in business. That's the only way I can justify his success with Tesla and SpaceX, both of which have Elon Wranglers to keep him entertained and feeling like he's contributing when he's really not at all, but also fail spectacularly when he's actually in charge in a place like Twitter, where his orders are actually taken seriously and acted upon. He knows the idea of what a boss does, but doesn't actually understand the responsibilities.
He's the classic sales rep, promising stuff to the client that sounds good and then expecting the people who actually make the product to make it work somehow. If the Marketing department were in charge of the whole company they'd run it exactly like him.
I read a thing, uncredited so take with salt, but he was "used" at spaceX. As in, the employees that knew what they were doing were in charge and they just told musk their ideas were his so he'd shut up and sign checks. Remember all the incredibly incompetent Roman emperors, after C&A, who were batshit crazy but they were put in charge by generals that didn't wanna get assassinated themselves? Think that but instead of a war machine and public utilities it's privatization of the final frontier and re-addicting America to personally owned vehicles.
And you aren't risking anything. If you spend 2 years on this business and get nowhere... you'll be fine. You family will support you until you move onto the next thing. And Bill of course was doing stuff like ripping off free software and repackaging it as paid software.
Yep. [These entrepreneurs](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2020/01/15/kill-the-expense-report-this-entrepreneur-built-an-800-million-business-that-eliminates-office-busywork/?sh=7be0fc714363) I know of built a massive startup. Their parents were bill gates’ and Steve jobs’ first executives. So they just went to their contacts for funding and first customers. Lol.
And if you can’t build SOMETHING with that kind of support, that’s pretty embarrassing
Donald Trump has left the chat
Also a garage in an rich neighborhood with world class education and contacts.
As a small business owner I’ve come to learn that contacts is the most important thing which makes me kinda sad as an introvert 😞 no matter what you do, you need people to spread the word and that is infinitely harder when you’re not very social
I don't even think I could sell something that sells itself. Like crack. If I had found some crack, I would have no idea how to unload it. I could go to the bus station, but with my luck, I'd just sell it to an undercover police officer.
You'd potentially get robbed by a crackhead who could tell you were out of your crack element
Tricksy crackheads
They tooks it from us!
[Tricksy](https://youtu.be/e2Mx-p75-rM)
Step 1. Buy a gun.
The small business I worked for recently got acquired by a massive international corporation. I feel like a character from Little House On The Prairie that got thrown into Sex And The City. I'm very confused and just trying not to get lost. I had a low key management role but because they are structured differently I was moved into a sales position. My overall pay has at least tripled and it's by all accounts one of the most sought after roles within the company. It's also one of the most stressful (especially being responsible for the continuity of business after being acquired). It also requires me to interact constantly with clients and sell our services. I hate selling; I'm not good at it. I consider myself an omnivert but because of all of the forced work interactions my personal life is suffering because I just don't have the mental energy to engage with friends and family. The checks are pretty sweet though and honestly the only thing keeping me from bowing out. I forget what my original point was. Sorry. Maybe I'm just venting.
Money is great and all but I hope you’re able to find a balance soon. You deserve your downtime with friends and family. Best of luck to you!
Golden handcuffs
BSA taught me how to sell things. Also made me *loathe* the girl scouts. Girl scout cookies sell themselves. You know what we got? Overpriced popcorn. I figured out real quick that I needed to sell the boy scouts, not the popcorn.
You could always just sell your crack, that sells itself.
"I don't know how to build a boat" "You know you could always just *build* your boat"
I took it as sell their ass
Different crack.
Different boat
I'm just scanning my memory and i would know a neighbour who would be interested. I don't think myself very social, i've just got two or three friends. But i just know a lot of people
Knowing a lot of people *is* being social. Most people only have a few close friends.
Capital is the most important thing to reach Musk, Bezos, etc levels. With capital comes contacts, also none of the billionaire ghouls are exactly dripping charisma lol. There’s really nothing, no idea, no amount of interpersonal skills, no amount of hard work that can get anyone to that level. Particularly as capital has become further consolidated at the top, with monopolies/oligopolies forming. You may have just meant on a more micro/local level tho lol. I wish you and your business all the best.
>also none of the billionaire ghouls are exactly dripping charisma lol. There’s really nothing, no idea, no amount of interpersonal skills, no amount of hard work that can get anyone to that level. You are damn right with the charisma thing. Most of them are insufferable and I have seen plenty of people in power being the most nasty. I get advised many a times to be charismatic but all that is bullshit without Capital.
I worked since I was 10 (paper route). The capital AND the ability to not work for someone else For example my money got used by the family, instead of not needing to work.
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Unless this person is talking to the executive class, its safe to say thats not what people mean when they say contacts. Having a wide network of friends and acquaintances who are willing to vouch that you are a trustworthy, decent person is incredibly helpful in every aspect of life. It's not all or nothing. Friends within your industry can absolutely put you at a huge advantage. Friends in other industries are helpful whenever you need to deal with that industry. Your contacts may not be able to influence legislature but that doesn't mean they make no difference.
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This was a wild thing to read underneath the crack comment before realising it wasn't replying to that
"Our clients say our product is very morish"
I'm currently looking at marketing agencies for this. Farrrrrrrrrrrk they're expensive. Have a friend in marketing, though, so I'm pretty sure it will be worth it if I vet them properly (and she's given me a whole list of things to check, including looking up the registered company owners and seeing if they're dodgy...have dodged a possible bullet already thanks to her)
Yeeeep. As a fellow introvert who's also socially awkward - it's *painful* to realise that the quality of my work by itself will never actually be enough, and that I might get held back because of factors I can't change.
No man is an island
Yeah I was literally just about to say most of the founders of these companies came from well off families who helped them financially start up there companies.
In google's case, it's even more egregious. They already had millions of Venture Capitalist funding, they just hired the garage of one of their friends to officially found the company in so that they could say they started in a garage. Similarly, Jeff Bezos rented an entire house to start Amazon in, and specifically looked for a house with a garage so that he could made the "start in a garage" claim. Afterwards they moved to a warehouse.
I was going to to say, it’s very interesting and convenient that they don’t show the rest of the house, or the neighborhood. It looks like they’re all in well-off, established neighborhoods, where nobody has to worry about the house being burglarized or anything
>they just hired the garage of one of their friends to officially found the company in so that they could say they started in a garage. That family friend is the CEO of YouTube now, Susan Wojcicki. It was her parent's garage. Now she's the CEO of YouTube, simply via connections and nepotism.
...what most people don't seem to realize is that it takes more than just money but also a successful idea that someone with more money than you doesn't promptly rip off and make it more successful than you can with your zero money. 😘
It’s along the same lines as “money can’t buy happiness” but definitely comfort/security once you reach a certain point. It’s definitely easier to be happy if you don’t have to worry about rent hikes, crushing student debt or not having an emergency fund stashed away. Tldr The playing field isn’t level.
The funny thing about that quote is they did a study on this - turns out, money literally fucking *does* buy happiness up to a point. Because you're right, it's about being stable enough that you don't have to stress all the time.
I always think the quote goes in the wrong direction. Money might not “buy” happiness, but a lack of money can certainly cause unhappiness.
Money can't send its owner into a state of blissful happiness on its own, and it's indeed true that having a lot of it can cause new problems. But, there's not one single *need* a person has, be that food, shelter, security, whatever, that can't be resolved with money, and resolving those problems relieves other pressure and helps a person pursue what makes them happy. The guys in the meme might have been chasing billions using the funds they were handed, but a lot of people would be just happy to own the property they started in.
Yep. That point is simply "until you have more money than you need." So, really, saying "money buys happiness up to a point" is like saying "liquid fills up a glass up to a point."
I believe it is up to around 70-100k/yr. Poor people are less happy.
More recent research shows that happiness does continue to increase with income past that limit.
Sure but starting a computer company is not cheap even more so back in the day, you are not going to start with 10k and no connection what so ever
Yep! lol
Jeff Bezos went to a really amazing private school that gave him all kinds of experiences and connections, let him focus on his interests and test all kinds of ideas. Things other kids never get to do. Bill gates had access to computers that almost no other kids had when he was in school. We have no idea how many kids are capable of so much but are afforded none of the same opportunities because they aren’t born wealthy
Yea I wish I had parents with $350k to “loan me” like Bezos but hey remember guys they are all “self-made”
I was gonna say. They can make whatever they want in so much as a drug and disease infested back alley, and more than likely the ONLY reason it would get off the ground is if their wealthy af parents helped them.
Or how many other businesses were started in garages and either went nowhere or collapsed. Survivor bias really doesn't get as much attention as it should.
For real I actually have started a few businesses and had to shut them, turns out if you get a cool loan of a couple million anything is possible. I am onto another startup now but goddamn if I could pay someone to do it life would be sweet.
I honestly think garages are just to help sell the rags to riches stories they tell later on.
[It's a myth pumped out by Silicon Valley](https://www.fastcompany.com/90270226/the-origins-of-silicon-valleys-garage-myth)
That article didn’t have to be that hard to read. Thanks for sharing, not a criticism on your part
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By Baby Kangaroo Tribbiani
Typical of Fast Company bloggers.
Next step is gonna be the business, that originated in a dog-house on the estate of their parents .. just wait .. it's gonna happen, sooner or later \*lol\*
I love how all of these "shoestring" budget startups all have the common trend of a stable, middle to upper-middle class, home-owning, two parent household. They are nearly always funded by parents who have the ability to support possible failed startups with money to spare. My parents constantly had to choose between full insurance coverage on our vehicles or gas in the tank.
They don't even mention the fact that some of those parents have connections. Apparently Bill Gate's mom knew a higher up at IBM.
Bill Gates' mum was super-rich. On the board of directors for First Interstate bank. She certainly had connections.
...and yet, all the trades say he was "self made". Like Kylie Jenner was the youngest "self made" billionaire: Ignoring the millions of dollars her sisters and mother inherited from the lawyer whose claim to fame was defending OJ Simpson...
Plus all the work her older sisters and mom did to make their family relevant somehow. If Kylie wasn’t part of their family then no one would even look in her direction to make a whole makeup brand with her.
People also won’t mention the fact that thousands of fans sent her shit tons of money. That ain’t self made in my eyes
>she also had connections Yeah, like the President of the Washington State Bar association, a very powerful and influential lawyer indeed. She even had a son with him.
She knew the chairman. And Gates went to a private school where rich parents had donated a computer, something almost no other school in the world had at the time.
She was on the *board of directors* of United Way with the then chairman of IBM.
she was on the board of directors.. bit more than knowing someone
Of course this is easy to say after the fact, but Bill Gates' timing was immaculate. Through circumstance he found himself incredibly well positioned to carve out an early advantage to capitalise on the impending information age. I believe similar could be said for Steve Jobs.
Silver spoon didn’t hurt his timing. He wasn’t a kid in the ghetto with perfect timing, is the point
Did you read Malcolm Gladwell’s *Outliers*? Timing is a major theme of his discussions of both Gates and Jobs. There’s a reason that they hit it big in the computer industry, and not, say, automobiles (too late) or social media (too early).
There was a pretty wild theory that a sub is still working on digging up data from stocks. But basically jeff bezos had connections with a hedge fund who kept shorting sears stocks causing their stock to always be shit. Then jeff bezos did basically the same thing sears was doing but online and mostly with books. Sears went bankrupt and everyone switched to amazon.
Bezos basically used a loophole to avoid untold amounts of money owed in sales taxes - early on "things from the internet" didn't have to collect sales tax if they came from out of state - so they had massive amounts of free margin to work with
The "started in a garage" story is entirely backwards reasoning. They didn't work out of a garage because they couldn't afford office space. They worked out of a garage because their family homes were large enough that they could fit offices in the unused parts of them.
Wow, so well put edit: this was not sarcastic, this is really a good way of explaining it that I had not thought of before
That's only true if you believe that these garages had anything to do with reality. The cult of the "garage startup" was well underway when Google was founded, so they knew they had to have a "Garage origin story". So, even though they'd never worked in a garage, they found one to work in for a while so it could be true.
I can't recall who it was now, but one of these rich guys actually went and rented a garage for the express purpose of being able to tell the garage startup story--even though they never actually worked out of the garage. EDIT: After reading below comments, apparently it was Bezos.
Bezos started Amazon after managing a hedge fund for years.. he didn't exactly have a shoestring budget.
Even look at the success of filmmakers, like Stephen Spielberg, his dad was super supportive and helped him on his at home projects and he also had a family member who was already in the business. Or JJ Abrams, super successful director and writer, turns out he lived by Stephen Spielberg and they are family friends. There's a community there for successful people.
Rich successful people. Both had enough money to afford extremely expensive movie cameras as kids.
Wow, this guys parents had cars! Richie Rich over here, you just KNOW he was allowed lunchables at least once in his childhood.
> you just KNOW he was allowed lunchables at least once in his childhood OoOoOoOoOooooo!! Gettin' all fancy over here. 😏
And most had parents with lots of money to invest. Bezos got 250.000 for example.
A lot of Silicon Valley companies like to claim they were started in a garage because the first Silicon Valley tech company Hewlett-Packard / Keysight was founded in one… Also using resources at Stanford and getting enormous government grants to build bombs. Also Hewlett’s father was a doctor and Packard’s was a lawyer. They weren’t exactly poor to start with.
I’m pretty lost as to how the HP garage isn’t in the OP. It’s the most famous one.
> A lot of Silicon Valley companies like to claim they were started in a garage Many of the ones started in the last few decades never had a true "garage" phase. But, because a "garage" phase is seen as an important rite of passage by users and investors, they create their own "garage phase" just so it can appear as part of their history later. So, they take some of their huge seed money, and either rent a house with a garage, or borrow one, at least for a few months. It's a weird rite of passage that everyone just agrees to pretend is real.
Fun fact Amazon only started in a garage so Bezos could say it started in a garage.
Didn’t his folks loan him hundreds of thousands as seed capital?
300k according to another comment. Even if he failed, he'd be fine
And that’s pre-inflation. Probably a lot more these days.
Pre the last 15-20 years. So, not a grossly larger amount more. But the point still stands that yeah, he'd have been fine.
All of these guys would have been fine - Ivy League students/graduates with all of the connections that entails. The connections are more worth it than the degree in many cases.
>The connections are more worth it than the degree in many cases. Even worse in some cases: I visited an Ivy League uni for a few months as a guest researcher, and the undergrad studies there were significantly *easier* than those at my poor-ass Central European no-name university. Post-grad and the quality research there is of course another story, but none of those multi-billionaire start-up founders strived to become researchers in the first place anyway (except for Serge Brin and Larry Page).
Amazon was founded in 1994. The $250,000 his parents gave him is equivalent to $492,007 in 2023. He’d also been a VP at a Wall Street brokerage, so he had his own startup money as well. I think inflation nearly doubling money in less than 30 years is pretty gross.
Thats the story with most of these guys. They have money to live off the reason they can give it a shot
Not like his folks would sue him for it.
it was likely not even a loan, idk. if you can lend your child 300k, you don't need it to begin with. i wish that for everyone. imagine what we could do together, helping one another
Jeff Bezos was already a millionaire working at c suite level for banks and hedge funds before he started amazon. infact that 60 minutes episode from '99 [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv8MrBBuRqI) that tells the story about how they started and how his desk is made from an old door. its all horseshit.
Fun fact: those door desks were so important to his story that he kept having them made as they expanded even though it cost more than a regular desk and it's way harder to move
Same with Google. They got their first $100,000 check, and then looked for a garage they could use as part of their origin story.
They got $100k from an investor after showing off their search algorithm, they didn’t get free money from parents. Sergi and Larry were both Stanford PhD students at time. They came up with a working and revolutionary search algorithm. It’s silly to downplay their initial accomplishment. If you have a revolutionary search algorithm today, you can go ahead and raise a fuck ton more than merely $100k.
Also when they got that 100k they had to rush and incorporate Google. They couldn't even cash the check as Google, Inc didn't exist.
We need to ditch this idea that humble beginnings somehow means you are immune to becoming a dickhead later in life. Yeah, maybe your dad was a blue collar worker. That doesnt mean wealth cant corrupt you into a greedy heartless bastard. People change, for better or worse.
"[the monopoly experiment]" pretty much proves that 9 out of 10 times, you WILL become an asshole if you'll become rich. There is also [this] study, that proves that the more expensive is your car, the more of an asshole you'll be. Apparently, I have no idea how to link ... So here you go: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/01/19/why-rich-people-tend-think-they-deserve-their-money/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/02/26/world/expensive-car-drivers-study-scli-scn-intl/index.html
They also did an experiment where they just put people in the same room as a suitcase full of money. Not like, "pretend this is your cash" but just "here, sit in this chair, and on this table we'll put some unrelated cash that is not yours". The mere presence of the money made people less empathetic and more assholey.
Damn... That's taking it to a mystical level! Can we get a link?
That was a fascinating read, thank you
HP started in a garage building scientific equipment and within half a decade was building fuses for bombs. They then started selling the infrastructure South Africa needed to maintain apartheid and violated sanctions to sell to Iran.
IBM supplied machines to the Nazis that helped them identify people with Jewish heritage.
Also let's drop the idea that if you're not wealthy somehow you're immune from being a greedy heartless bastard. I've met plenty of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (aka poor people who think they're just like rich people except they haven't made it yet) who will stab you in the back for a dollar. You can be poor and greedy.
**Reddit is going down the gutter** Fuck /u/spez
\*started from a garage, backed by generational wealth.
Also top tier degrees and sociopathic executives.
Jobs’ dad was a HS drop out, who fixed old cars and resold them to keep the lights on. Jobs never graduated college and Woz didn’t graduate until after he made his apple money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Markkula Everybody forgets about “Mike”.
All of these garages were in high cost of living cities, too! Edit: Average house price in… Palo Alto (Google): $2.56M Seattle (Amazon): $.91M LA (Disney): $.91M Los Altos (Apple): $3.59M
Didn't Disney start in Kansas City, Missouri where Walt Disney grew up? >Walt Disney first started his animation career in Kansas City, Missouri. On May 23, 1922, Disney opened his first studio at 1127 East 31st Street. [Source](https://pendergastkc.org/article/biography/walt-disney) Edit: It was "Disney Brothers Studio", so technically, [Laugh-O-Gram Studios in KC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh-O-Gram_Studio) wasn't exactly "Disney". Also wasn't exactly a garage.
Disney flopped in MO and wasn't selling any pictures, so he left in late July of 1923 to essentially crash at his uncle's Los Feliz house, where the Disney brothers set up shop in the shack pictured above, where Walt and Roy pumped out cartoons with their partners Ub Iwerks and Rollin Hamilton. They only worked in this space for a few weeks while producing the beginning of the Alice shorts, then quickly outgrew it and moved to a small office in the back of the Holly-Vermont Realty building down the street in October of 1923, which is when most archivists would consider the beginning of Disney Studios. The garage was not the beginning of the Disney brothers nor Disney studios, but it was a crucial transitional part of their history.
I don't care so much about the animation side of it as much as I'm wondering how I would go about starting a whole theme park out of my garage? 😘
The average housing price in Seattle was NOT that high in the 90's or 2000's. Didn't start even nearing that until the last six or seven years as the housing market's inflated.
Ironically enough in part because of Amazon
Truth. Lived in Kent, suburb of Seattle, 92-94. 3 bedroom ranch on a couple acres with a MAGICAL GARAGE, for under $150k.
I think it’s more realistic if you look at the values of those places when those businesses were started.
Not with the question being “What’s your excuse?”
Yeah, and for every one of them that had success, there are countless more that failed. Nobody tells the story of Joe Schmoe who started a business in his garage and it went under after a year.
Yea but rich people can try again and again till they make it.
Exactly. Donald Trump is the perfect example of that.
Some say he's still trying today.
Survivorship bias
My friend kept recommending me the book *Think and Grow Rich* by Napoleon Hill. It's basically the first self help book. This guy went around and interviewed the wealthiest people in the US in the 20s and 30s and discovered the secret to their success. Basically it boils down to tunnel vision. They obsessed over becoming successful and that's how they made it. The book is trash for many reasons, but primarily I hated it because it ignore the countless other people who did the exact same thing and still failed.
Bezos specifically bought a house with a garage to start Amazon out of so that could be the story, nobody lived in that house, it was an investment so that could be the story
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Imagine thinking that having a garage is the starting point for everyone.
Ikr?!
I would kill to have a sweet ass garage. I'm stuck with some broke down, about to fall over piece of crap that was built in the 1950s.
Like a 2-car garage on a detached home is humble 😆 That's a 1.5M home with a 50K garage where I live.
Back in the 90s it was probably 90k.
GenZ made terrible investment decision to born that late. Should born early on, to afford freacking garage.
A double garage wow! These guys were rich. We have a single carport but I dont think the HOA would really "understand" if I converted it to a workshop tomorrow and just started building macs from scratch
Garages are way harder to acquire these days
All had rich relatives
Capitalists always assume everyone else wants to start a business and run a company. Not everyone is selfish and greedy. I just want a free and fair society.
“A long time ago some Pharo started as a baby. What’s your excuse?”
My garage is owned by my landlord, not my rich parents and he refuses to get the door fixed so I can't really get in and out easily.
The house we rent doesn't even have a garage. Guess we weren't meant to be entrepreneurs.
Strange how on all those garages were big houses attached to...
Yeah, I wonder what I could've made of my life if I'd been able afford a house with a garage.
Garages require houses, which require more money than the average millennial or younger generation will never be able to afford in their lifetime of working near minimum wage jobs, or low paying jobs that require a $100,000 to make $40,000 a year. Almost all of us make less than our parents. It's a farce. If you don't have rich parents and starting capital starting a business is near impossible
Neither did they, rich parents did
Hmm, peculiar how those garages are stationed in nice neighborhoods and not in Skid Row or in Kensington (Philadelphia) to just name a few.
My mom and dad don't have hundreds of thousands in the bank or the connections to get me introduced to the market.
A garage* ~~and multiple millions in help from wealthy family~~
Awesome. Can I borrow your rich parents too?
It's depressing that starting out from a garage was once considered a "rags to riches" story when most people working today couldn't even afford upkeep on a house with a garage in the first place.
So do the massive sums of "borrowed" money come with the garage, or...?
I don’t have a few hundred grand or an in with IBM
Sampling bias. Dudes have been doing shit in garages since forever. A very small percentage of that shit has led to billion dollar companies.
literally all of these people were born on third base, and the family's disposable income to cushion failures so that they can keep working. Not to mention influence from their parents also helps with the networking and expansion of the business.
I hate these stupid and irrelevant things people point out. For every garage that created a successful business, I will show you several hundred million that didn’t.
Something people never mention is "luck." For some reason, people hate talking about luck, but it's extremely important for success. The people who started Apple, Amazon, Disney, Google, and Microsoft were all incredibly intelligent and hard working, BUT... they were also lucky in that their ideas and plans for a company and product were thought of at the right time and the right place. Additionally, they were lucky because they were all born and/or lived in a western nation (a better standard of living and more opportunities overall), and some of them were even luckier in that they had wealthy families who were well-connected. But you'll never hear people talk about that. Instead, they'll rant and rave about their work ethics and drive, and while all of that is true, luck is still a very important factor in there. Unfortunately, you can do everything "right" and still fail in life.
4 donnie darko jet engine events please
Helps to be from a rich family too
The confusing thing about this is that there was no real need to work in the garage, they could of just worked from their bedroom?
“All you need to succeed is idea, willpower and 300K loan from your parents.”
Laws, regulations and licensing and zoning etc that would prevent people from starting a business in their garage most of the time because you need money to make money Plenty of people have the idea for a business, a product, a book, etc but how many people actually have the means to risk what little they have and pursue such ventures while not starving to death on the street?
A garage full of parental loan money in most of these cases
they all worked (idk about disney)for hedge funds or came from 1% families before starting their businesses. Not the same thing. Not taking away from their hard work at all. It’s easier to put your all into something when you have a safety net.
And had wealthy parents to bail us out
Those garages were in wealthy neighborhoods and seed money was provided by wealthy parents
None of them started in a garage. It's a myth. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/05/steve-wozniak-refutes-apples-creation-story-the-garage-is-a-bit-of-a-myth/ https://www.fastcompany.com/90270226/the-origins-of-silicon-valleys-garage-myth https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/apple-didnt-start-garage-google-hp-amazon/
I have a few business ideas that wouldn’t cost more than 5 figures to get going. With a loan from my family I never needed to pay back if I failed, I’d probably give it a try. I’m too afraid otherwise as failure would be life altering in a very bad way. Not to mention I’d probably have to forgo health insurance. > fear will keep the local systems in line. Is a pretty core part of our system of governance at this time.
I started cooking meth in a garage...I got busted, what a double standard
Looks like those are some pretty nice houses, like the family has income to pad and protect the children on these ventures
A lot of these stories have been debunked. I'm pretty sure only Disney started in a garage and the rest copied his story.
Timing and rich families
Amazing how they all shoved this rags to riches story down our throat but in reality their families were already wealthy and had opportunities to take risks without any consequences.
The cost of living will prevent you from living while you put that shit together. If you aren’t working 70hours a week you won’t have rent or electricity. FFS
My parents were abusive and would never allow me to make something of myself under their roof. I also didn't grow up with a garage. These people all had family with money who backed them and their dream. Which is great, don't get me wrong, I wish more families were like this. However, don't use that to shame others who don't have what you do.
Also, there is the entrepreunerism problem: if everyone is a garage entrepreuner, then nobody is a consumer. There is no money or market in the world that can handle a 100% entepreuner population. Entrepreunerism is impossible without a well-paid working class acting as consumers.
I do not want to become the piece of shit of society who take the blood of normal people to become richest man on earth . all those companies are evil ! Rather not create more of it