Disconnect: entrepreneur porn is a dangerous fantasy (and I’m not just talking about success rates)

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

You’ve read it before, even if you’re not familiar with the term “entrepreneur porn.” The tech startup industry is full of it: stories about founders who bravely quit their day jobs and set out on the long and difficult startup slog towards success. Their passion for their company usually estranges friends and family, stretches their finances to the breaking point, and everything nearly falls apart. But at the end, it all works out. The protagonist’s company becomes a big success, and he’s sitting on a beach in Thailand sipping mojitos, writing about why you should do the same thing.

Of course, it’s all a fantasy. Most of the entrepreneur porn essays and stories we hear are cherry-picked, highly romanticized, and – if you’re trying to seriously assess the realities of doing a startup – downright dangerous.

The first and most obvious issue with them, which I’ve written about before, is the unrealistic ending. Most entrepreneur porn spends a lot of time describing (and romanticizing) the startup struggle, but in the end things virtually always work out. In reality, of course, this is rarely the case. Most startups fail. If these essays were realistic, most of them would end with the author moving back into his parents’ house, not sipping mojitos in Thailand.

But that’s just the really obvious issue with entrepreneur porn. There are some other slightly subtler problems it poses too, at least for readers who haven’t taken the startup plunge yet but want to get an idea of what it’s really like.

Your startup journey is not guaranteed to end here.

1. It’s almost never rags to riches

Entrepreneur porn tends to emphasize the lean times, working 22-hour days and eating instant noodles and cheap coffee three meals a day. It gives the impression that lots of startups are rags-to-riches tales.

That’s not usually the case, though. There are definitely some real rags-to-riches stories, but most entrepreneurs come from middle- or upper-class families, and that gives them the advantage of lowered stakes. Sure, the startup life is a struggle, but for most entrepreneurs the risks of failure are actually pretty inconsequential. If their startup fails, they can go back to their corporate job – you know, that high-paying one they mentioned quitting like it was some heroic sacrifice at the very beginning of the article – without having lost much beyond a little savings, time, and pride.

To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it is something that prospective startup founders should be aware of. Real rags-to-riches stories are rare, and building a successful startup is going to be easier if you have some access to privilege. Put it this way: how eager do you think people would have been to join Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook if he hadn’t been a Harvard student?

2. You don’t need to be Facebook

Speaking of Zuckerberg, another common narrative in the tech entrepreneur scene entails building a company that starts tiny and grows into something immensely valuable like Facebook. I think anyone who’s even considered building a tech startup will be familiar with this scene from The Social Network, for example:

That idea is a big part of the entrepreneur porn narrative. It is, to borrow a phrase from actual porn, the money shot. The moment everybody fantasizes about. The moment when all the long nights and Ramen noodle dinners pay off because you sell your 30-person company to Google for US$700 bazillion.

3. Money won’t make you happy (within reason)

The real purpose of entrepreneur porn