Amen brother/sister. Was founder, co-founder, early employee, or investor in eleven startups, ten of which went out of business or were bought with no net equity earnings for myself, one of them had a $250m exit from which I netted $130k, after seven years. It's not that retirement-level-net-earnings startups never happen, just that they happen only about 1 out of every 1000 times on average according to my research. The exception being, every additional $1m of net worth you have before you found increases your odds of success, up to around 50% success rate with a net worth over $10m (going towards HNWI territory). So being middle class your startup investments are lottery-level, but if you're already rich they're more of a calculated investment.

tl;dr only capitalists - the existing 1% - have an odds-on shot at startup success