Entrepreneurship Is Not Gambling So Stop Acting Like It Is
We all take risks every day in life. Job security is an illusion, and being an entrepreneur does not mean you're risking a lot more than other people.
A few days ago, I made a comment on Twitter/𝕏 that got a lot of attention. A big account I follow asked this question:
“Coders, how hard is it to learn coding in terms of going from zero knowledge of it to hireable in some way?”
I replied to the post with this answer:
“I went from knowing absolutely zero to running my own business in less than a year. In terms of becoming hireable, I could have gotten a junior front end dev job in that same amount of time but chose entrepreneurship instead.”
As of today, my response has over 41,000 views and nearly 500 likes, and a bunch of people followed me because of it. That was cool. It also elicited a variety of responses, most of which were good but one that was fairly negative.
Someone saw what I wrote and replied:
“Good for you, not everyone is willing to gamble on something with a 90% failure rate in the first year, especially if they're wagering their family's livelihood.”
I responded:
“Correct. For me, I simply had to succeed: I had a wife and kids and failure was not an option. I kept going and here I am today still going.”
It turned out that I had actually misunderstood this user’s first comment: I thought when this user wrote “Good for you,” that it was sincere.
It apparently was not. Because his next response was quite harsh:
“So you refuse to admit that your entrepreneurship was gambling with your family's future, simply because you ‘won’ your bet.”
This is astonishing. I almost can’t believe it.
Of course, I replied to tell this user that I started my own business because I lost my job, and therefore, it wasn’t even my choice at all.
I started a company out of sheer necessity because I woke up one morning unemployed with a wife, three children, and a mortgage. What other choice did I have?
But aside from that, this kind of language and attitude really bothers me. Do most people view entrepreneurship as “gambling with my family’s future?”
That’s insane. Entrepreneurship is not gambling.
Okay, to be completely fair, starting a business from nothing does involve risk, but I contend that it doesn’t involve any more risk than not starting a business.
Since I started my company in 2008, the good news is, I’ve been around the block many times, and this isn’t my first rodeo (or whatever: insert your favorite cliché here).
My point is in ’09, ’10, and ’11, I was extremely nervous about being a business owner for the first time.
I didn’t know what to expect, and I wasn’t sure how to spend my time wisely as someone who worked for myself.
Many, many times since, I’ve thought, “I should just go get a ‘normal’ job.” And, in fact, I did do exactly that: twice. I left the “risky” world of self-employment to try and join the ‘normal’ world of ‘normal’ people with ‘normal’ employment.
I felt pressured to do it because that’s what everyone else did.
That’s what conventional wisdom calls for. It’s the smart choice, the safe choice.
You know what happened to me?
I got laid off again and again. Three times in total!
The first time I got laid off, the construction company I worked for fired over 20 people because it was the “Great Recession,” and real estate companies were hemorrhaging jobs left and right.
That’s why I started my own company in the first place.
The second time I got laid off, I had a job at a venture-backed software startup funded by Canadian billionaires. Guess what: they decided to pull their funding, and the company laid off 35% of their employees, including me, their newest hire.
The third time I got laid off, I worked for a coding boot camp in Boulder, Colorado, where the company was run in absentia by rich idiots who didn’t have a clue what they were doing. I warned them in my very first few weeks there that what they were doing wasn’t sustainable.
They didn’t listen to a thing I said, so the company crashed and burned. I got laid off, and a few months later they went out of business altogether.
So you tell me: who is gambling with their future?
All three companies I worked for are no longer in business. My company has been around for 16+ years and is still here.
Well, you could say, “Wow, Ron, you’re just an incredibly unlucky individual. You just had a particularly bad run at some awful employers, but that’s a fluke.”
And you’d be completely wrong.
I know many people who had “normal” jobs at “traditional” employers who were fired or laid off for no apparent reason, often with no warning.
One web developer I knew came to me years ago, frightened, seeking advice about what to do after he lost his job of twelve years at a nonprofit. He was desperately trying to figure out what to do next since all he’d done for a dozen years was show up as a full-time employee every day at the same company and work on back-end database programming.
Now, all of a sudden, and without any warning, he had to decide what to do to provide for his wife and children and pay his mortgage. Self-employment sounded terrifying to him. It was all so new: 1099s, self-employment tax, and no benefits, and you have to direct your own schedule and all that Jazz.
But guess what? If he started his own company, he couldn’t get laid off.
That meant he could take control in his own hands and have a more secure future than being at the mercy of an obviously irresponsible company that would kick a loyal employee to the curb like that without warning after a dozen years.
I’ve also met people who had jobs at great companies, but those companies got acquired by rich jerks who don’t care a whit about the employees they’ve just taken on.
I’ve seen it MANY times: some miserly skinflint at a private equity firm who knows (and cares) nothing about the employees he now has on his payroll takes a look at the company’s balance sheet late one night.
All he knows there are 315 employees on the org chart and he needs to get that number down to 250. So he takes an axe and whittles it down, all from the comfort of his 34th-floor luxury highrise in New York City, way past bedtime on a random Tuesday night, while sipping on expensive scotch, hundreds of miles away from the company headquarters that he hasn’t even visited.
I’ve also seen tragedy strike: my 18-year-old brother, who was fit, trim, and healthy as a horse, had a solid job at Target and was on track to make a full-time career with one of America’s biggest, most stable, and dependable employers, with a great benefits package.
One day, while visiting family in Colorado, he went for a walk outside to take pictures of flowers and mountains, had a heart attack, and fell down dead forever.
Stop saying entrepreneurship is gambling. It’s not.
You could have the cushiest job in the world, but when those jobs get outsourced to China, your entire career comes crumbling down before your very eyes.
When I was 16 years old, I worked a summer job for an office furniture company that went to an enormous 150,000-square-foot facility to “repossess” hundreds of chairs, cubicles, and desks from a technology company that didn’t need them anymore.
At one point, I wondered what the purpose of all this was, so I asked our foreman: “Why are we taking this stuff away? Why don’t they need it anymore?”
His response shocked and scared me.
“Offshoring. They just fired thousands of employees and sent all the work to Malaysia because they can hire people there to do the same thing for $6/hour.”
These employees, many of whom had advanced degrees in computer science and related fields, who were previously clearing $75k, $100k, $120k, or more were now unemployed. Through no fault of their own.
During that time, kids at my church’s youth group were submitting prayer requests such as: “Pray for my dad: he used to work for Lucent Technologies; now he’s looking at getting a job as a manager at McDonald’s.”
And, no, these kids weren’t joking.
Anyway, my point is that everybody takes risks in life.
It’s potentially just as risky to be a peon working a boring desk job at an enormous company where you’re employee #843 than it is to take your future into your own hands.
For Pete’s sake, you could have all the job security in the world and get hit by a car when crossing the street.
Stop saying entrepreneurship is gambling. It’s not.
Go start a business. If you’re smart and do it right, you’ll do fine.