For my money, organized crime has more in common with big box retailers than startups, because the amount of cash on hand you require (not to mention the infrastructure) is a pretty nasty barrier to entry. The market is dominated by a few key players and focus is on sustainable growth. Startups are about rapid growth and disrupting established industries by artificially lowering the barriers to entry.
Walmart started as one store, don't believe you can't compete with them, I see mom and pop shops sell products in the same categories as Walmart and win.
Bootstrap so you don't have the pressure to 100x for an investor, and so you can pull out some of that $2mm once it starts flowing.
It's easy to point out how $2mil a year might be only 1% or even 0.001% of the total size of some particular market, but that's irrelevant. No amount of business is guaranteed. $2mil is still $2mil, it's still x number of people each ponying up y number of dollars, for pretty significant values of both. Without a compelling product and a solid brand you have no guarantee of that. There's no such thing as a business venture that makes $2mil in a worst case scenario. The worst case is always losing money.
The counter argument is that the latter kind of business models (e.g. social) have much higher potential payouts due to scale. But I believe one doesn't have to look too hard in the first category (e.g. SAAS) to find billion dollar opportunities that collapse into million dollar ones if the winds change.
The opposite is true though: there are a lot of companies that will have trouble doing more than $2 million. I think the author is suggesting you don't pick one of those.
In the end, the real cost is time. Do you want to spend your time building something small, or something big? That depends on why you're working, I suppose, but if you really don't care what the business is, might as well build something big.
If you know of a business where even a bad run nets you $2mm, I'm sure everyone here would love to know.
This kind of vague general math is silly. It assumes that the chance of success stays more or less the same while the potential pay-off obviously grows for larger ventures. If it were that simple. You simply can't make an intelligent generalization along those lines. Any comparison should be made on a case by case basis.
His point about risk is very unclear and/or misleading. He suggests we should think big vs small. It's almost insulting to read an article this vague. What do you even mean by small and big? As far as I know, businesses that aim to make 2M/yr rev have a better shot than ones that must make 100M.