They get paid for the X years it takes their startup to crash, probably quite well.
Afterwards, they are considered an "Experienced entrepreneur" and thus more likely to get their foot in the door to more negotiations, given press time etc.
What part of this is failing?
One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
Another thing is, you're pretty much locked into that company for X years. Even if you realize on year 1 that it's not what you started out to build, you still need to go with it, otherwise you're seen as an irresponsible prick, and people won't see you as "experienced entrepreneur". Most of the times what happens is you either trick yourself into thinking that it will work, or compromise your initial vision into building something mediocre that generates money (For example you may start out thinking you will build the next generation social network that will change everything, and end up with a behavioral targeting ad network)
Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
> One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
> Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
> If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
please, enlighten us with the hardships of being paid lots of funny money, and spending even more funny money, on something you know is going to fail for X-1 years, but you keep doing it anyways because ???
I have better things to do than trying to enlighten some random guy online.
Not with someone else paying for it, and knowing I'll still be well-regarded even if it fails.
It's easy to sit on the sidelines and make snide remarks about founders who you think are wasting others' money paying themselves cushy salaries (most pay themselves far below what they'd make at Google), but I don't think you're really in any position to until you've put yourself out there in some similar fashion.