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August 29, 2005
Risk management
Paul Graham has an essay he posted recently on Inequality and Risk, in which he writes, "Decreasing economic inequality means decreasing the risk people are willing to take."
He means to say that if you raise taxes, less folks will want to do startups. That's no doubt true. Running a startup is probably as bad as raising a family of small children on your own. Of course the potential payout is much larger than anyone raising a family of small children on his (probably her) own, but since if I have to pay for them, your kids do not amount to a good investment for me, though your startup might be, I agree with Paul. Tough luck to single parents.
Anyway, Paul's a hacker, so I figured somewhere in there he would say he did it for the love of creating something, not for the financial power. I read along until I got to the financial security argument:
Like many startup founders, I did it to get rich. But not because I wanted to buy expensive things. What I wanted was security. I wanted to make enough money that I didn't have to worry about money.
Hmm. So what would you have been doing if you didn't have to worry about money in the first place, Paul? Bucky Fuller's been telling us we don't have to since at least Critical Path. What if you just didn't have to worry about it at all? What if you could do the startup thing, but it were like raising children, in that you get something out of it, even though it's hard work?
Posted by Mark at August 29, 2005 09:01 PM