I started my first startup with $30K, saved up from 2 years of working at someone else's startup. That bought me a year and a half of tinkering time and 4 shots at goal. It'd cost more now, particularly with Bay Area prices (I was in Boston), but we're talking about $100K, not $1M.
If you want to make an attempt, go work for a FAANG or one of the recently-public tech companies for 2 years, live like a grad student, and bank the difference. Then work for somebody else's startup for a year to see what life outside a big corp is like, then you should have 2-3 years saved up if you haven't increased your living expenses. If you can't get a job at a FAANG, unicorn, or one of the other leading companies in your field, you're probably not ready (in terms of knowledge and technical skills) to found a startup. Once you do you're looking at ~$200K/year in total comp, which saves up really fast if you're still living like peers who make $60-70K/year.
that's an overstatement right there. real life evidence points otherwise. lots of companies are founded on the humble crud stacks - php, django, rails etc where the founders or engineers hardly knew what they were doing.
however yeah, I agree having runway by cutting expenses buys you a lot of time to tinker around.
Work in a company with more than 50 people. Spend your time learning who are the two people that bring 80% of value to the business. Join those two when they go off to start their own business, which they choose to do because they are grossly underpaid at their current company relative to their impact.
If I can land a job at faang why would I quit after two years to start a one person startup myself with $100,000 capital live horribility for 2 years at a faang and probably 2 more years trying to live off of that 100,000.
It sounds naive. If I want my startup to succeed I can't wait two years to basically bootstrap the business. If I'm at a faang why not wait a little longer and leave with someone else and get millions in seed money?
"just"? Seems like you identified it as a main factor just like the parent. It's like the difference between necessary and sufficient but put in terms of probability instead: it significantly increases the chances that it's even possible to make an attempt. It's clearly not sufficient though, as you both point out though.