Research suggests that the average person will not pay more than $200 for the premium pill [over a pill with a 0.1% chance of killing them].
I don't buy this. For a young person, a 0.1% chance of death is years' worth of death risk. However, I think there's a way to "trick" people into a result like this. Say that Pill A has a 99.9% chance of delivering a cure, and Pill B has a 100% chance of curing them. First, "99.9%" sounds very good already, and "100%" sets off our bullshit detectors because almost nothing in medicine always works. The 99.9 figure is more precise and therefore more impressive.
Furthermore, there's a difference between (a) the pill itself kills in 0.1% of chances vs. (b) it's 99.9% efficacious. In (b), you can take the cheap medicine and try the expensive one if the cheap one does work. As for (a), that's not something we really face because no drug that kills 0.1% of patients at normal doses would be on the market. If it were used at all, it'd be restricted to hospitals and used only when the disease was severe enough to merit it (e.g. cancer drugs).
The prime candidates for entrepreneurial ventures are actually people in their 30s and 40s. Their startups are less likely to fail and reasonably so. They have more experience than people in their 20s and more drive than people in their 50s.
Adverse selection. Most 50+ who have their shit together don't want to deal with VCs and their bullshit. There are plenty of driven, 50+ year old entrepreneurs, but they're not interested in VC. Also, they aren't interested in get-big-or-die gambits in general because getting back into the careers they left, at that age, is just much harder.
This suggests that corporations have a great deal to make by offering entrepreneurial opportunities to their employees.
I don't think that the concept of an "intrapreneur"-- except at a small number of companies like Valve (which only has a few hundred employees)-- has legs. Would Google or Microsoft or Citibank allow it if everyone wanted to be an "intrapreneur"?
While the intrapreneur path will involve a lower risk of financial loss (because it requires no capital investment, except opportunity cost in the willingness to take a lower salary and a more interesting job) it probably has a higher per-month job-loss risk. Employees can avoid behaviors that will make them enemies. They can choose not to give a fuck when it isn't their turn to give a fuck. Intrapreneurs don't have that liberty. They have to fight battles, work hard enough that they lose social polish, and (if their managers aren't supportive) navigate a conflict of interest between their personal project and their assigned work. They can easily turn into overperformers and get themselves fired. Moreover, I don't think that the sociological issues that are in play here are going to go away easily.
None of this refutes the title itself, as presented:
Why Corporations Could Get Higher Returns Than VCs
In fact, they already do. But that's another story entirely.
I don't buy this. For a young person, a 0.1% chance of death is years' worth of death risk. However, I think there's a way to "trick" people into a result like this. Say that Pill A has a 99.9% chance of delivering a cure, and Pill B has a 100% chance of curing them. First, "99.9%" sounds very good already, and "100%" sets off our bullshit detectors because almost nothing in medicine always works. The 99.9 figure is more precise and therefore more impressive.
Furthermore, there's a difference between (a) the pill itself kills in 0.1% of chances vs. (b) it's 99.9% efficacious. In (b), you can take the cheap medicine and try the expensive one if the cheap one does work. As for (a), that's not something we really face because no drug that kills 0.1% of patients at normal doses would be on the market. If it were used at all, it'd be restricted to hospitals and used only when the disease was severe enough to merit it (e.g. cancer drugs).
The prime candidates for entrepreneurial ventures are actually people in their 30s and 40s. Their startups are less likely to fail and reasonably so. They have more experience than people in their 20s and more drive than people in their 50s.
Adverse selection. Most 50+ who have their shit together don't want to deal with VCs and their bullshit. There are plenty of driven, 50+ year old entrepreneurs, but they're not interested in VC. Also, they aren't interested in get-big-or-die gambits in general because getting back into the careers they left, at that age, is just much harder.
This suggests that corporations have a great deal to make by offering entrepreneurial opportunities to their employees.
I don't think that the concept of an "intrapreneur"-- except at a small number of companies like Valve (which only has a few hundred employees)-- has legs. Would Google or Microsoft or Citibank allow it if everyone wanted to be an "intrapreneur"?
While the intrapreneur path will involve a lower risk of financial loss (because it requires no capital investment, except opportunity cost in the willingness to take a lower salary and a more interesting job) it probably has a higher per-month job-loss risk. Employees can avoid behaviors that will make them enemies. They can choose not to give a fuck when it isn't their turn to give a fuck. Intrapreneurs don't have that liberty. They have to fight battles, work hard enough that they lose social polish, and (if their managers aren't supportive) navigate a conflict of interest between their personal project and their assigned work. They can easily turn into overperformers and get themselves fired. Moreover, I don't think that the sociological issues that are in play here are going to go away easily.
None of this refutes the title itself, as presented:
Why Corporations Could Get Higher Returns Than VCs
In fact, they already do. But that's another story entirely.