Allow me to say approximately the same thing in a different way. Adam, I guess you would agree that there are some people who will almost certainly never found a really successful startup no matter how often they try. Do you really think Pr(you are such a person) is less than 0.1%?
Further:
Let's suppose you don't care about (c) above because once you've got a successful startup you don't mind waiting, so your 20-year window indicates only how long you have to start an eventually-successful startup. Then in view of the numbers above I suggest an optimistic timeline looks like: some number of iterations of (1 year working to raise money, then 2 years for a startup to fail), then one of (1 year working to raise money, then 5 years for a startup to only-just-fail), then one of (1 year working to raise money, then startup succeeds). Then you have time for about 3 "quick" failures and one "slow" failure before succeeding. At a 75% failure rate, that's a lot less than a 99.9% chance of success. And if you fail on this path, you're now fortysomething, you have a long track record of failures, and you have no retirement savings at all. Good luck!
(When I say "an optimistic timeline", of course I'm aware that some people get there much quicker. But you have no reason to think you're in the lucky not-very-many-percent who will succeed first or second time around.)
I'm 22 years old, just got a job, and have the option of putting money in a 401k. More generally, I just started making money and need to think about how I'm going to invest and save it.
As far as long-term/retirement savings goes, the way I see it is that my goal is to ensure that I have a sufficient standard of living when I'm "old" (70-80). I see a few ways that this can happen:
Median optimistic year (10% likelihood): 2022
Median realistic year (50% likelihood): 2040
Median pessimistic year (90% likelihood): 2075
- http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
And even if they're wrong and there's no singularity, it still seems to be very likely that there will be immense wealth creation in the next 60 or so years, and I'm sure that there'll be a fair amount of distribution as well, such that the poorest people will probably have reasonably comfortable lives. I'm a believer in Kurweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, but even if you project linear growth, there'd still be immense growth.
Given all of this, I find thinking that "wealth creation + distribution over the next 60 years -> sufficient standard of living for everyone" is a rather likely scenario. But my logic here is very "outside view-y" - I don't "really understand" the component steps and their associated likelihoods, so my confidence is limited.
Anyway, I think that there is a pretty good chance that I succeed, in, say the next 20 years. I never thought hard enough about it to put a number on it, but I'll try it here.
Say that I get 10 tries to start a startup in the next 20 years (I know that some take longer than 2 years to fail, but 2 years is the average, and it often takes shorter than 2 years to fail). At a 50% chance of success, that's a >99.9% chance that at least one of them succeeds (1-.5^10). I know 50% might seem high, but I think that my rationality skills, domain knowledge (eventually) and experience (eventually) give me an edge. Even at a 10% chance of success, I have about a 65% (1-.9^10) chance at succeeding in one of those 10 tries, and I think that 10% chance of success is very conservative.
Things I may be underestimating: the chances that I judge something else (earning to give? AI research? less altruistic? a girl/family?) to be a better use of my time. Changes in the economy that make success a lot less likely.
Anyway, there seems to be a high likelihood that I continue to start startups until I succeed, and there seems to be a high likelihood that I will succeed by the time I retire, in which case I should have enough money to ensure that I have a sufficient standard of living for the rest of my life.