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This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.
https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A few thoughts.
Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.
I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff
He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.
Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.
I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.
Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.
yeah this is why if you have a decent net-worth, just park it in tech stocks (like QQQ or maybe add some leverage to the mix) and get a nice 20-40% yoy return. Or maybe real estate. No need to take the extra risk with high rate of failure with small biz or start-ups. For every Facebook, there are many failures. Entrepreneurship so expensive, too much failure, and too much work.
If everyone does that, and they do, power concentrates into finance and you slowly stop doing anything productive as a society.
Actual rent seeking has negative externalities. Even if it's the correct choice.
I actually think PE provides value. It provides an exit for entrepreneurs especially when they can’t go public. Let’s say you build a 100m business but are getting close to retirement and your kids aren’t all that interested in building it or you have business you want to start? PE provides an exit to those kind of business starters likely increasing business formation.
There were always exits available (selling to competitors or larger players who could access financing publicly or privately) and in countries like Germany the traditional solution was simply to have the family hire a professional manager but to keep the business in family hands. The US, UK and other prime PE markets saw their skilled manufacturing sectors suffer while Germany is a net exporter that sells China the machines they use to make goods for American and British consumers.
I do a lot of PE work and most targets aren’t manufacturing.
Of course, but it’s an example of how higher liquidity for SMEs that a large PE sector offers isn’t necessarily healthy for the wider economy. In the UK PE culture (which I’d argue is stronger even than in the US) is responsible for a rotten business culture in which even attempting to build a large new business is anathema to most entrepreneurs. This is often described as a result of growth capital being much harder to access in the UK than in the US, but this only explains a small part of it. The primary reason is that PE offers founders a lottery win that is often so tempting that they abandon their ambitions. In the US, billionaire hustle culture is ironically a partial protection against this, but European founders will cash out and retire to Cannes as soon as the first PE check is dangled before then, which I consider genuinely damaging because my impression of people in operating roles in PE is very poor.
Yeah it may be cultural different. In the US, there is still hustle culture.
Also PE now often offers 5-10% mgmt equity so still incentivizes mgmt.
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