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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.
I almost want to asks if your joking.
If you did any leverage on tech stocks especially the best performers this year then last year 2022 your bankrupt especially since you mention Facebook.
It traded $92 last November. Even unlevered your feeling poor. Any even modest leverage and your bankrupt on that move. Tech was absolutely trash in the markets a year ago.
I agree if you can get that job that something at one of the big techs offers a nice comfortable salary. But everyone else in capitalism always has a bit of failure risks which is my main point that the rich people have always faced a brutal failure at some point.
If your a high IQ guy taking risks the best advice is to find some doctor to marry with stability.
yeah leverage is risky. But even non-leveraged nasdaq lost 80% of its value from 2000s highs to 2002 lows. But still not nearly as risky as starting a biz with your own capital. only a quarter of small businesses make it to 10-15 years.
VC is an alternative. The VC shoulders the financial risk, not the entrepreneur. But this is harder to get. Understandably, VCs are picky. Having the right connections helps greatly in this regard.
much of the stuff has recovered all or most of the losses. QQQ closing in on new highs. Leverage adds new complications due to path dependency. The nice thing about 1.5x leveraged ETFs, which is what I am doing, is it mostly solves the path dependency problem of leveraged stock trading.
A lot of people think buying a small business versus market exposure is far less risky. You control the cash flows.
if I had to guess, buying a business way more risky and work than diversified stock portfolio, even an all-tech portfolio. Also lots of asymmetric info: if a biz is on the up-and-up why would they sell to you? this means tons of due diligence , and having to hire auditor and attorney, which is more money and time. having control of cash flow assumes there is much margin to work with. lol I know that if I took the opposite point, you and others be telling me how the stock portfolio is way less risky than the biz
Simple answer is IQ arb. Look into search funds which have gotten popular with mba types.
A lot of small businesses have a moat in the sense that as you go down the IQ scale they are not managed well but provide useful services. But there are many that have a ton of cash flow but are sub scale for pe. So your not competing with your other Harvard mba for the next platform grad but some guy with a ged.
Today, whether its harvard business school or Cornell or Columbia, the biggest growth clubs are the small businese investment clubs.
everyone with MBAs, who dont wanna do big corps, seem to wanna buy a cashflowing mom and pop business. opportunities might have been arb’d away
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