This isn’t really true and should not motivate us to value desperation. Survivorship bias prevents us from hearing the voices of those who chose the final solution to desperation.
Thousands of scientists and engineers would not have been motivated to work on ballistic rocketry and guidance systems if they had not been curious to learn about the moon and outer space.
Congress would never have spent 4% of the 1966 US federal budget on the Apollo program[1] if it had not been desperate to tell allies and enemies about our ability to land a payload in Leningrad.
NASA inspired millions of children in the 60s and 70s to go into science yet real progress in space technology seems to have only picked up recently. Similarly with nuclear technology, it took 12 years to get from nukes could exist to 15KT yields to 50MT yields but we still don't have fusion and fission reactor designs haven't changed that much in decades despite significant problems.
Sometimes I feel like people are change adverse and won't just change things to improve them. People only really change things when there's a significant threat of them getting worse. Reality is surely more complicated and nuanced but I think it will mark a significant change in our evolution when we improve things because we know they can be better instead of racing to avoid a disaster.
I’d encourage you to read the Wikipedia article on Taylorism and then to read The Toyota Way and/or Leadership is Language.
I don't have a strong opinion on this issue, IMO it's too complicated and subjective to feel confident in any particular stance. There's no question in my mind that entrepreneurs taking larger personal risks are more motivated to make things work, but whether that translates to a net positive or not? Who knows?
Where we see desperation in a company history, we should look again to check if it is actually relentlessly resourceful curiosity.
Anyone capable of starting a tech company has the skills and motivation required to get a reasonably well paying tech job.
And that's more or less what most of them do when their startups fail. I see a lot of resumes from people listing themselves as CEO or CTO of a tech startup that barely registers in a Google search.
I know at least one recruiter who makes a habit of calling up people at Crunchbase companies with <10 employees and letting them know to reach out if they're ever thinking about going back to the job market. Turns out, a lot of them are ready to go back to regular jobs after realizing that startup life isn't as glamorous as it sounds.
If I wanted to stay in this field, my only option was to start my own business which I ended up doing. Things worked out quite well.
> Anyone capable of starting a tech company has the skills and motivation required to get a reasonably well paying tech job.
I find that way too simplistic and too blankety even for a blanket statement.
I say that's mostly true, provided they're authorized to work in the US and move there.
In a similar boat now after having had a taste of entrepreneurship but running out of runway. I used to be a model tech worker but now being back at a regular job just seems so... pointless, even though it pays well
Strategizing and executing at the business level is so much more fun than back and forth discussion about how to best fit something into a large existing codebase and making sure your PRs are small enough... but it’s hard to get employment doing that kind of work with a SW engineer’s resume
These days, sitting at the office listening to Katie go on about her weekend and Micheal go on about Apex legends or as you mention... but it's missing that weight or sense of purpose.
In my country though, putting former startup founder @ 28 years old makes you un-hireable.
> we confirm labor shocks disproportionately impact high-earners and these same workers start more successful firms
I had to work 2x as hard to make the same salary on my own the first year, but after that the rewards became easier as the company grew.
I doubt I would have had the courage or interest in leaving a comfortable salaried position for entrepreneurship if I wasn’t forced into it. Turned out to be a life changing lay off for me though in a good way.
> "Forced entrepreneurs" risk great personal consequences because they have no other options.
This is just ground reality for many entrepreneurs (immigrant families opening new restaurants, for example) and does not serve as much of a differentiating factor. Based on the study in the OP, the differentiating factor is more likely to be some difference in risk tolerance by way of savings (since these were high earners after all), some difference in skill (since these were high earners after all), or some difference in opinion of self (since these were high earners after all) which kept them from giving up and just taking a minimum wage unskilled labor gig somewhere.
It's not interesting that people turned to entrepreneurship after being laid off. It's interesting that people who were laid off from cushier jobs were able to start businesses more successfully.
To me, it just feels so much more real than working at a big company. At a big company, I felt like I just tried to make my boss happy and I had a very limited toolset to do such. As an entrepreneur, it's very connected to delivering value to other people who won't give you the time of day if you don't. It's difficult to explain but it feels way more real than a job.
Also love how customers don’t give a ** about who you are, just how good your product is. Very different from typical employment where there’s a constant undercurrent of posturing and your person/personality is always front and center to your performance, as much as people don’t wanna admit it
But c'mon, I quit my job to get away from working for a living for a year. I put in 4-6 hours a day in earnest, but it was pretty obvious from the beginning that I wasn't gonna finish and coding the game was just an opportunity to be more creative than I am as a manager.
No way would I have ever entertained this idea without knowing I could walk back in to a high-paid job a month after starting to look, which I did.
The willingness to walk away is a game changer in sales (and other things in life).
Or you don't try entrepreneurship at all, because if you fail you don't have anything to fall back on.