by pmichaud | 2025-05-01 20:10:32+00:00
I think in conversations like these most people on the successful side underestimate how valuable the starting advantages were, and most people not on the successful side overestimate how valuable the starting advantages were. Meanwhile almost everyone misunderstands what the advantages really are.

People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do anything!" meanwhile millions of people with much more than that fritter it away on nothing, even if they are trying not to. It takes something more to be Bezos.

Whereas the proverbial Bezos will think about the grit and determination it took to march for decades through treacherous financial and political swamps, and think "would I have let a lack of an initial 300k stop me from even starting? Would I have failed to secure the capital and cooperation without that seed? Given the heroics I've pulled over the years? Hell no, that wouldn't have stopped me."

But here's the part that most people misunderstand. The 300k is a small advantage, it might have made a difference, and some cases might make THE difference, but it's only the most concrete, obvious advantage. The real thing is like this:

In my earliest memories I was pretty poor, but also in those memories both my parents were going to university, while my dad was packing fiberglass at a factory. Then they graduated and he got a job and we became suburban middle class, my dad staying at his big corporation for the rest of his life, while my mom more or less stayed at home although she went back to school and ended up about half way through a PhD program. I would think about what career I wanted as a child, and what school I might go to, that sort of thing.

Fast forward to my first wife who I met when I was 17. She is self described "british ghetto trash," and she emigrated because she couldn't escape her accent, in a phrase. She taught me what I didn't know about privilege, at a time before that was a term anyone was using for this purpose. The reality she knew in the council housing (ie projects) where she grew up was that her dad was a scam artist flake who floated in and out of her life without regard for the many promises he made, and whenever he pulled off a big one he'd show up and splash a little cash around before running off again. He was far from ashamed, he was a "2 types of people in this world!" type scammer. Her mom wasn't much better, basically scamming the government for benefits, working whatever angle she could but never actually "working working."

My ex never thought about careers or schools or anything. She thought about what scam she could pull to make it to next month. It was a weird series of events that brought her across the pond, and into university and beyond.

That's what Bezos had that my ex didn't have. He thought he belonged inside society, he thought he could do things and that people would let him. He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously. The same for her but opposite, the idea of participating in society at all, never mind changing it was utterly foreign to her experience.

I think it was crushingly more important than the 300k in terms of pivotal advantages. It sucks to start with bad cards, but it's much tougher to not be in the game in the first place.