My motivation behind this post stems from Aumann's agreement theorem. It seems that my opinions on startups differ from most of the rationality community, so I want to share my thoughts, and hear your thoughts, so we could reach a better conclusion.

I think that if you're smart and hard working, there's a pretty good chance that you achieve financial independence within a decade of the beginning of your journey to start a startup. And that's my conservative estimate.

"Achieve financial independence" only scratches the surface of the benefits of succeeding with a startup. If you're an altruist, you'll get to help a lot of other people too. And making millions of dollars will also allow you the leverage you need to make riskier investments with much higher expected values, allowing you to grow your money quickly so you could do more good.

A lot of this is predicated on my belief that you have a good chance at succeeding if you're smart and hardworking, so let me explain why I think this.

Along the lines of reductionism, "success with a startup" is an outcome (I guess we could define success as a $5-10M exit in under 10 years). And outcomes consist of their components. My argument consists of breaking the main outcome into it's components, and then arguing that the components are all likely enough for the main outcome to be likely.

I think that the 4 components are:

1. Devise an idea for a product that creates demand.
2. Build it.
3. Market and sell it.
4. Things run smoothly (some might call this luck).

The Idea

Your idea has to be for a product or service (I'll just say product to keep things simple) that creates demand, and can be met profitably. In other words, make something people want (this article spells it out pretty well).

What could go wrong?

• Failure to think specifically about benefits. These articles explain what I mean by this better than I could.
• Failure to understand customers. To put yourself in their minds and understand what it is that they do and don't want. This is distinct from the first bullet point. You could have a specific benefit in mind, but be wrong about whether it's something your customer really wants (or about how badly they want it).
• Failure to research competitors. Maybe you came up with a great idea, but it turns out that it exists already.