Coming from a "poor" entrepreneur who has previously held six-figure software engineer salaries, I can say there's more to entrepreneurship than salary. When I busted my ass working overtime to add cool new features, nobody cared. The company doesn't care, the boss doesn't care, your coworkers don't care either. If I have to spend 1/3 of my life at work, I might as well be doing something I love, even if it puts my retirement at risk.

I mostly agree. But there's something to be said for retirement.

You can retire well even if you only make $10 an hour for 40 years. It just requires you to be very frugal with your expenses and investing wisely. Let interest do the heavy lifting for your retirement :)

The interest rates here are pretty much zero ...

The expected value of doing a startup is high -- I think a little higher than being able to guarantee myself $80K/year. If I work on a startup with 1 cofounder for 5 years and it's got a 10% chance of exiting for $10M, my expectation is roughly $100K/year. So if I can afford to take the (rather high) risk of getting nothing, then I should do the startup.

If I value my time differently depending on what I'm working on -- if the startup is lots more fun -- then it's an easy choice.