The other side of risk adverse isn't apathy. At a big company, if you're smart, work hard, and do what tasks are assigned to you, chances are you'll have a long and profitable career. Fresh out of school, a smart and motivated engineer could expect to make say $750,000 - $1,500,000 over five years working there, with almost no personal risk. Over their career, at present value, probably pushing to $10 million.

If you start a company, however, your returns vary extensively. If you're smart and dedicated after five years you might come out broke - or even in debt. Or you'll come out being barely able to make the rent. Or you'll be a millionaire or billionaire. As an entrepreneur, your risk five year returns would be somewhere between -$100,000 to $10,000,000+, with the expectation I would guess quite a bit lower than the Googler's.

That's not to say that either is the right choice - mathematically, the big corporation choice will make you more money in the expectation and probably take less of your time. But you know, life's not about optimizing the integral of income over your career.

I'm saying that "At a big company, if you're smart, work hard, and do what tasks are assigned to you, chances are you'll have a long and profitable career" is false, at least at Google. If you're smart, work hard, and do what tasks are assigned to you, you'll top out at SWE3 with a salary in the low six-figures. Getting promoted to Senior SWE requires selecting the right projects and some degree of leadership and organizational awareness. Getting promoted to Staff or above also requires sticking your neck out to promote some initiatives that may be controversial, and convincing people to go along with you. This is not all that different from the skillset required to be an entrepreneur.

That's why I suggested picking a big corporation with more of a reputation for "doing what you're told", like IBM, Cisco, or even Apple. Google in a couple years might be there, but right now you cannot get to the higher engineering levels without sticking your neck out on an initiative that may be controversial at first.

(It's also true that the risk/reward curve is flattened a bit at Google than at a startup: at Google, you're still being paid a relatively fat salary if your high-risk project fails, you just don't advance. And if it succeeds, you end up with a raise and a promotion, not F-U money [usually]. But this article is about the emotional aspects of failure, not the financial ones, and those are still just as relevant at fast-growers as at startups.)