This doesn't help TFA, but building a successful business is usually really difficult (based on what has been seen and written about other successful businesses). Also, many entrepreneurs fail multiple times before succeeding at a business.
Indeed, sometimes luck is against you. COVID was probably not on most people's risk models, so who would know it was a bad time to start most businesses?
And while sunk cost fallacy is a real problem, I suspect that some terminations with that excuse might have been successes if pursued further. But having a family and children is a significant priority conflict with being an entrepreneur, so I certainly don't judge the TFA. But likewise I don't think I would use the sunk cost expression.
> I wouldn't advise anyone with a family to start a startup. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that I don't want to take responsibility for advising it. I'm willing to take responsibility for telling 22 year olds to start startups. So what if they fail? They'll learn a lot, and that job at Microsoft will still be waiting for them if they need it. But I'm not prepared to cross moms.
> What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business. Empirically the chances of pulling that off seem very small. You're never going to produce Google this way. But at least you'll never be without an income.
> Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own. Being one of the first employees of a startup is a lot like being a founder, in both the good ways and the bad. You'll be roughly 1/n^2 founder, where n is your employee number.
> As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to start startups when you're young.
Indeed, sometimes luck is against you. COVID was probably not on most people's risk models, so who would know it was a bad time to start most businesses?
And while sunk cost fallacy is a real problem, I suspect that some terminations with that excuse might have been successes if pursued further. But having a family and children is a significant priority conflict with being an entrepreneur, so I certainly don't judge the TFA. But likewise I don't think I would use the sunk cost expression.