Utterly false dichotomy. You can innovate from a safe job(tm) as well (not that any job is safe in an age of at-will employment). The difference is that in exchange for a lower payout for success, one gets a much higher payout for failure, a sort of UBI if you will.

Sure, you can innovate in a safe job. And then your employer likely owns it. Good for them!

That's not a criticism of corporations, just pointing out that taking a risk and striking out on your own isn't necessarily a reckless decision.

Yes, they own it, in exchange for protecting you from the 90% chance of failure (perhaps you should save your best ideas for when you've acquired enough resources to build it on your own? I don't, ideas are cheap, it's the executions on those ideas that has built value for me).

And I don't think startups are reckless, but I think a lot of the people that join them fail to do rudimentary financial calculations as to whether doing so has a better expected return than a safe(tm) job.

Otherwise, they wouldn't accept chicken scratchings worth of lottery tickets and 20-50% lower compensation. But yet they do, over and over, no matter how many people lay it out how bad an idea this usually is.

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-y...

How noble of those large corporations to save you from yourself!

So, basically, your point is that you should sneakily hide your best ideas from your employers and then strike out on your own when you hit that magical amazing idea! You know, that idea that is obviously going to be an amazing success and you can know that ahead of time! People that foolishly try to succeed on their own time are rubes! Instead of accepting a check from the government, you should mail it in with a job you're entirely checked out of until you find the magical secret sauce to make yourself a billionaire. That's great for everyone right?

>You can innovate from a safe job(tm) as well

To some extent, but big companies are likely to be much more conservative towards new ideas. If they weren't, there would be little benefit to being an entrepreneur.

Another bogus assertion: Big companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple etc. are constantly iterating on innovation. Most of that innovation never sees the light of day just like most startups are destined for failure.

IMO the benefit to being an entrepreneur is that if you truly have a winning idea, you can own a lot more of its fruits by pursuing it from your own business. For it requires nearly the same skillset to procure VC as it does to persuade a large company to let you build something. Risk is and should be proportional to return.

To that end, I have nearly 20 patents filed from within large companies, most of them single inventor. And my salary amortized over a 4-year startup life cycle is on par with what I would have gotten as a non 3-letter title at an acquired startup that wasn't a Google or a Facebook.

So why take a chance on failure without the chance of a big payout? And except for the 3-letter titles, that's what a lot of newbies unknowingly sign up to do, risk >>>> return. I have no desire to socialize this learning experience for them.

This goes both ways. The cost of making failure painless is that people don't try as hard to avoid it. If the relative difference in utility between success and failure goes down, the incentive to achieve that difference goes down.