If leetcoding and going from 0 to acquired by Facebook in a year were just as hard, we’d all be rich.

Even if it was only an order of magnitude difference, the expected value of starting that startup would be so much higher.

They aren’t even in the same ballpark

I think it really depends on your background. For people with a questionable job history, poor credentials, modest intelligence, a speech impediment, and a criminal background self funding to Raman increases in difficulty less than working directly for Facebook. However, ridding the VC train has a lot of the same dependencies as working for Facebook, but is vastly more difficult.

The same is true of networking and friends and family financing. I might look at scraping together a ~200k seed round as trivial, but that’s not true for everyone. On the other hand if 5 of your collage friends are working a FANG companies that’s also a huge leg up.

We’re not talking about bootstrapping for a year, op said selling to Facebook in a year. To pull that off means awesome traction or clubhouse level hype or deep serial founder connections, or corruption at high levels.

All of these are much more difficult to pull off, often requiring years, than simply hitting the books for a few months

The companies that FAANG acquire are usually mid sized, 50+ employees. Getting to that size, in a particular industry that will be of acquisition interested is not going to be easier than getting hired.

Might get you hired at a higher level though, but yeah delusional to think it would be easier.