Friction is why it pays
Ninety percent of people want a calm life. The returns of entrepreneurship are the price the market pays the other ten.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 9:52 (la economía del emprendedor, razonada en vivo)
- ↳ Entry 1-3: Programmers weren't overpaid: they were scarce (el mismo motor de escasez, apuntado al emprendimiento)
We left the tax office asking ourselves the honest question: why are we complicating our lives? ▸ 11:46 Sitting with it produced an answer that reframes the whole bureaucratic swamp.
The economics of the complicated life
An employee’s deal is clear: fulfill the contract, keep the schedule, no risk; worst case, a memo ▸ 9:32. Reaching a very good salary that way takes a decade or two. As an entrepreneur, the same income should be reachable in far less time ▸ 10:00. Why would the market pay that premium?
Supply and demand of a scarce input: people willing to eat friction. Roughly ninety percent of people, reasonably, want a calm life and a job. Maybe ten percent are willing to complicate theirs ▸ 10:20. The paperwork, the daily fines, the risk, the no-reminders tax regime: every unit of that friction shrinks the supply of people who persist, and the returns concentrate on whoever remains ▸ 11:02.
la fricción es el foso →
This is the same scarcity engine from entry 1-3, pointed at entrepreneurship itself: programmers were paid for scarce syntax; founders are paid for scarce tolerance. If the frictions dropped, more people would enter and the returns would compress. The swamp is the moat.
Logged with honest uncertainty
The counter-hypothesis, stated for the record: maybe I’m wrong and big companies simply capitalize the whole market and never let the small ones up ▸ 11:32. We’re about to test which theory is true with our own money, which is the only test that counts. Either way, the reframe survives today: every form we file is a form someone else quit at…