A lot of people are commenting on the feasibility of clearing all these hurdles, but I've got a different reason for steering clear. (It's the same reason I avoid jobs on Capitol Hill, though I live in DC). Startups require a heckuva lot of time at their inception. The thing I'm buying instead is time with my friends.
I'm in my 20s, I make enough to have a reasonable standard of life and to save/give, but not enough to retire dramatically early, by any means. My work doesn't follow me home after work, it's not the main focus of my attention, and that's just the way I like it.
I'll also add that investing a lot of your 20s into a really time-consuming job (startups, i-banking, Capitol Hill) may really slow down your chance to date and discern marriage with a partner. Again, not a tradeoff I wanted to make.
I came to similar conclusions. Seriously attempting a startup would be very time-consuming and stressful. The original poster doesn't understand why this is, because he miscalculates the execution, production, marketing, and team risks involved in his project. But unless he has a serious financial safety net, he will soon start burning through the limited resources of his money, time, and energy, which could hurt his social development.
Personally, working at an early-stage startup has a much higher expected value for me than trying to run my own thing.
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?