Life Is Like a Startup: Parents Are the Venture Capitalists

If you can make enough money to support yourself, you don’t need to listen to your parents.

A rich dad lays out the path: if the kid can’t get into a good school, they’re sent to a community college in the US and then transfer to a prestigious university. If they can’t publish papers, someone else writes them; undergrads can rack up a dozen SCI publications. If they can’t find a job, it’s a 4+4 program—internships arranged, positions secured. If everything is hand-helmed from start to finish, sure, listening to your parents works just fine. You’re in charge, you’re the one executing.

The so-called rich dad is just a wholly-owned subsidiary. You’re not really a company—you’re more like a department within the parent corporation. You can’t operate profit and loss on your own, nor do you intend to. You’re simply following headquarters’ directives. Hit your KPIs and there’s a bonus; miss them and there’s nothing, but you’re never going under.

Then there’s the poor dad. These parents may be barely literate, but they don’t interfere with their children’s choices—partly because they can’t, and partly because they don’t understand. They’ll just lay it out straight: “We don’t have money to prop you up.” If you can study, we’ll sell everything to fund you. If you can’t, learn a trade or carve your own way in the world. If that doesn’t work out either, you’re joining your dad on the construction site. This is what “the child of poor parents grows up fast” means—early autonomy, owning your own decisions, making your own path, and taking responsibility when things go wrong.

The so-called poor dad simply means no outside investors—grassroots startup mode, free to do whatever you want.

Now consider the middle-class parents. They have no capital, no network, no special resources. What do they have? Some alleged “success formula.” They got out of a small town because they were good at studying, landed a decent job, and caught the real estate boom during a period of universal asset appreciation. That’s their entire playbook, and now they want their kids to copy it verbatim. Back in their day, few people went to college, competition was light, and the pool of graduates was shallow. Even if I perform as well as you did back then, the times have changed—and I’ll still be left behind. More importantly, most of your wealth came from luck, from riding the wave of broad-based appreciation. Do I have that same luck? No. You ignore both realities and just keep saying, “Work hard, work hard, replicate my effort.” If your boss asked you to do something you fundamentally believe won’t work, wouldn’t you just check out?

But middle-class parents are like minority shareholders. Imagine you raise capital and give them 40%. As shareholders, what’s weird about asking them to make demands? What’s strange about unreasonable demands? If you choose to be supported, don’t complain about losing independence. Reject the funding, and the sky’s the limit. Assess whether ceding part of your autonomy in exchange for your middle-class parents’ financial backing is worth it for the long-term growth of your own life’s enterprise. If it is, take the funding and accept the strings. If it isn’t, walk away. Don’t try to have your cake and eat it too—take the money without signing a performance agreement. That’s not how the world works.

Someone who truly wants to do something doesn’t wait around for anyone to hold their hand. Only those half-heartedly pretending expect miracles to come from being carried along. Miracles don’t happen by being pushed—they happen because you work like hell to make them happen.

That’s life: if you want to be understood, why should anyone understand you? Most people believe only after they see—it’s not “believe first, then see.”

The ordinary person’s holy trinity: wait, rely, beg. If you don’t want to be ordinary, stop waiting, stop relying, stop begging.