> If you start a business you generally get paid or make profit the whole time

What tech startup is this? Profitability is a long road & for a good chunk of the time you're relying on funding to get you through to profitability. You might get paid but how much you withdraw impacts your runway.

I agree with you that it's a way more interesting journey, but it is by no mean "easier". Especially since OP was talking about getting acquired at the end. Just keeping your business alive is hard enough, let alone being acquired by one of the FANGs.

It's not easy to get acquired by a FANG, but if you're okay with acqui-hire terms of most companies, you'll eventually get acquisition requests if the startup gets a little bit of press or has some traction. I've personally gone through this process several times already, turned down a few acqui-hire requests, and eventually accepted one. One of my startups only lived for 4 months before it was acqui-hired, which was still more enjoyable than doing 4 months of interview prep.

In hindsight, if I accepted my first acqui-hire request, I would've eventually got hired into Google because the startup that wanted to hire us was eventually folded into google, but honestly it's hard to tell from a distance which companies are going to be acquired by a FAANG.

I was part of an aquihire and got screwed every which way. As the acquired's only person in my position and required (almost! I'm not delusional) in order to transition the company, I should have driven a harder bargain when deciding to go along with it. In the future I would not go along without a significant retention bonus, like, say, a percentage of the purchase price that reflected my contribution.