"Given all of this, I think that if you're smart and hard working, you should have at least an 80-90% chance at succeeding at a startup."
Your method is bad- you have come up with some imaginary numbers and not addressed the obvious difference with reality, except with the qualifier that you mean people who are "smart & hardworking".
Surprisingly, when I went looking, you might be partially correct: at least for people who really are smart and hardworking and for certain values of "success". To look at the Ycombinator list - the number of "failures" or dead companies is very low and this probably provides a decent filter in that they are as experienced as anyone in identifying people who are smart and hardworking in the ways relevant for a startup.
The huge caveat is of course that nearly all startups don't get funded by ycombinator and "not dead yet" is not comparable to "success".
Making up imaginary numbers and then coming up with a rationalisation for those numbers is still a horrible way of making an argument though. Worse, you haven't explained why your made-up number is so different from the commonly quoted made up number that 90% of startups fail.
Your method is bad- you have come up with some imaginary numbers and not addressed the obvious difference with reality, except with the qualifier that you mean people who are "smart & hardworking".
No, I'm just trying to take an inside view. I think the main reason why success rates aren't as high as they should be is because of my very first bullet point of people being unable to think specifically about benefits.
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:
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?