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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like how it should be. Business owners are taking the risks, but also profit more in good times.

These days I wold argue that especially in small businesses and startups the first employees are the real risk takers. The owners/founders will usually find a way to get some money when a company is failing while the employees get nothing.

How are owners of small businesses able to make money while their company fails? I would like to know because I plan on starting a business in the coming year.

Selling assets. Get acquired for customer data. Lay off people before the company money is gone and liquidate. There are probably a lot of other ways.

I’d like to know too. If it’s so easy to make money while failing I think I might start a business just to fail and make money.

Rinse and repeat and I’ll be rich very fast.

May as well just start day trading at that point, dunno about the rich fast part, or the rich at all part but hey, the math is fun at least.

I didn't see the part where anyone wrote that it was "easy".

IP, code, contracts, customers, data

The point of starting a company is that you pay time-limited salaries to employees while accumulating investments in systems, tools, and processes that allow for/increase the efficiency of the generation of profits through doing something valuable for others. The portable assets among those investments remain valuable if that value can be harnessed for some context somewhere. Often, these values are far lower than they would be if you had a functioning organization operating them but something is better than nothing.

I think there is small class of founders who fail and end up better off than their employees but it is not the majority of cases. If you factor in resume/connections/experience, that number is certainly higher -- but that seems fair to me.

Small businesses maybe, but large businesses work the cycles of the economy like a ratchet. Bailouts in hard times, buybacks in good times.

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