I agree with everything you said but the #1 obstacle to owning you own business is seed capital. You don't have to be a genius or rich to start a company, but you do have to be willing to take a potentially big financial risk to do so. People fresh out of college don't have 20k to live off of for 6 months before they can turn a profit on a business. The average household has 10k+ in debt; those people cannot start a business either.
I agree with you, but I think it's more dire than what you are painting. I'd rephrase something more like this:
People fresh out of college (most of whom are already carrying a 5-figure debt) don't have $60k to live off of for the 18-months before they (might) turn a profit.
I've been around VERY few businesses that were profitable at 6 months. Either you are digging out from the high initial capital costs (like a restaurant) or you're actually having to build the thing you want to sell. Going from inception to profitability in 6 months would be, at least by my estimation, remarkable.
Building products and launching services takes time. If we want to encourage entrepreneurs, we should be focused on getting them over those initial hurdles.
Even if they all had the money, 95% of them will fail.
HN likes to focus on the success side of the equation - but with high risk also comes a high failure rate.
I know tons of people who started their own businesses -it's got little to do with seed capital and everything to do with execution. They had it, and they blew it, through bad decions mostly.
"People fresh out of college don't have 20k to live off of for 6 months before they can turn a profit on a business. The average household has 10k+ in debt; those people cannot start a business either."
For those grads, I suppose ycombinator and techstars suit them well. That's only a small part of the "Small Business" equation, however. There are cafe owners that need part-time help and need easy-access capital to help them over supply humps.
Not every inventor can get float money from crowdsourced places like kickstarter, either because their product is not "consumer-friendly" or because it's in a decidedly unsexy industry (like precision gauges, for example). And, while there are cool coworking or tool-borrowing libraries popping up, there are no cool "we'll work on your marketing, sales admin" places. Those take money. The SBA-for-all concept can help, I think.
I should print this out and frame this on my wall: "Why our industry is insular and tunnel visioned."
Entrepreneurialism in the vast majority of this country, let alone the world, is not at all related to computers, the internet, cloud services, or any such hoo-hah.
We exist in a little tiny sphere in a little tiny corner of all that is small businesses.
The vast majority of entrepreneurialism that happens in the world has real costs and a need for real capital. Try running a corner store when you have no money to buy inventory, or pay rent on the space.
Back in 2006 my brother and I started a business with $0 upfront cost.
1and1 at the time was running a deal for 3 years free hosting. We made a site on there, put up AdSense, made enough money to buy a domain. Then made enough money to upgrade to paid shared hosting, and then dedicated hosting. It's still profitable today.
