Reward requires effort, but effort does not guarantee reward.
It's a fact of life that we really should teach our kids instead of the nonsense that effort will be rewarded.
Or at least that's how I always read it in my head.
I spent 3 years trying to keep a startup afloat after graduating from college. Most of my peers own a (some of them multiple) house now. I have 75k in my savings.
It has taken about a decade of switching back and forth between consulting and working on the SaaS until I run out of money. Some consulting stints took a few months, others a few years, depending on our needs.
As I grew older, our needs and risk aversion in the family increased, so I just took on longer or more financially interesting consulting assignments, to grow a bigger buffer and allocate some extra assets.
I'm quite sure that, if I had just been consulting the last 15 years, I would already have been able to retire (owning more real estate and other assets).
However, my life would have been very different, and every single time I took on an ad interim assignment, I noticed the impact of my SaaS building experience was a big plus for my consulting assignments...
I'm not saying it's all rainbows & unicorns - building a SaaS is romanticized a lot, but IME it's an infinite game that requires a lot of grit, and as you grow you move the goal posts, so you're always in "hard" mode -, but I beg to differ that it has led to a more interesting life for me personally, as I tend to get bored quickly.
I have a few friends that built, sold, and could retire, but every single one of them has started building something new...
You need to love playing the game and be willing to sacrifice things, as the odds are typically against you.
To quote Simon Sinek "The only true competitor in an infinite game is yourself." [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/simonsinek/status/1433808001375277080?t=...
The happiest entrepreneurs I know got advanced degrees, had a solid career, developed plenty of contacts, then launched something in their 30s or 40s with substantially less risk than taking a punt on knowing what problems were worth solving while at University, or taking a punt on finding the right person to start a company with while at University, or taking a punt on having the wide range of skills required to actually make a company work without ever having any work experience.
This is the sort of hype that drew me in when I was younger and I think it's damaging. The real way to start Google is to be smart, hard working and incredibly lucky. IMHO the best way to start a company is to be smart, hard working and patient.