Your broader point is important too: startups are unfortunately too often a luxury of the upper class. It is extremely scary to take a risk when you don’t have a safety net. I was personally broke when we started Cloudflare and had to borrow money from my mom to pay my rent. But I could borrow money from my mom. And I had a mom and a family that if I failed would make sure I didn’t go hungry. My family wasn’t anything close to what I now see really rich looks like, but we weren’t scraping by. Had I not had that safety net I don’t think I’d have had the confidence to start Cloudflare. And I think that’s a real issue with entrepreneurship we don’t talk enough about.
But there are also plenty of people that have worked for a while, provided themselves a safety net and go on the startup journey in their 30s and 40s. Eg. Eric Yuan, who was a eng VP already before zoom.
But I guess those don’t grab the same headline attention.
For anyone not upper class, if you spend 6 or so years chasing a startup and fail, and you’re a good software developer.. once you factor in savings and interest, your total opportunity cost is something like 2-4 million dollars. That’s making a good software dev salary for 6 years and saving some of it. That’s life changing for someone not already rich. And you’d still be learning a lot, plus working a much more relaxing job with time for side projects.