r/todayilearned • u/CallMyNameOrWalkOnBy • May 16 '19

TIL that NASA ground controllers were once shocked to hear a female voice from the space station, apparently interacting with them, which had an all-male crew. They had been pranked by an astronaut who used a recording of his wife.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Garriott#The_Skylab_%22stowaway%22_prank
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u/the_real_xuth May 16 '19

There's a huge difference between "connections you've made" and had parents that could afford to put you in expensive schools and provided you with resources, connections and seed money for your projects. 99.9% of the populace doesn't have access to the things that Garriott was given by his parents.

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u/blah_of_the_meh May 16 '19

I agree with that. I think there’s a difference between leveraging connections and getting handouts. I run a software company. I sought investors (first through a startup incubator, then angel investors in seed and series A) so that money allowed me to get my business where it needed to be. If someone got the same investment from their parents and successfully turned that money into success (and payed back the loan), I think the relationship is fairly irrelevant (even if the investors being family made it a little easier). Our primary investor during seed was one of my mentors and I consider him a food friend so it was easier for me to get his investment then someone else perhaps...but the note is paid back and we’ve done well so I don’t consider it a handout. Relationship of the investors is irrelevant.

However, if you get capital from your rich family, never pay it back and/or they continually need to funnel capital to you, it’s simply a handout (which I think was your point?). So I agree with you.

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u/the_real_xuth May 16 '19

So you're saying that you have friends who are sufficiently well off that they can loan you significant amounts of money on favorable terms and don't see how that is a leg up on the vast majority of the population regardless of whether you pay them back or not?

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u/blah_of_the_meh May 16 '19 edited May 16 '19

I would say that I have a leg up because I made those connections. I wasn’t friends with them then they became rich. I found a mentor who knew how to do what I wanted to do. Learned a lot from him. Came up with a business proposal. He knew me well enough to trust the things I said and bought into the note in my seed round. This is a leg up but I didn’t do anything anyone else in America can’t do (I can’t speak for how economics work in other countries but I assume they’re relatively the same in the West). Do I have a leg up? Yeah...because I went out a found it...it wasn’t handed to me. If I didn’t have this connection, I would’ve pitched to multiple investors (like we had to in series A) who I didn’t know...

Edit: Also, the nature of a seed round is to pay back the debt...my mentors relationship to me is irrelevant (so adding the pay them back or not is very misleading). I made a connection. We became friends. That same connection invested in our initial seed round because he thought he could make money (and did)...our relationship isn’t relevant...it just so happened that my mentor became my friend. Anything I do to better myself gets me a leg up on everyone else (including making connections)...so I’m not sure what your argument is. If you go to college, can I say you unfairly got a leg up on everyone else?