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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

outliers hold no interest for me. what percentage of people who tried to become successful financiers made it vs what percentage of tech entrepreneurs started a successful company?

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Maybe, but that's not what this discussion is about:

Original Post: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320439

  > Despite the high risk/high reward, I think the
  > expected value (in money) of going to Wall
  > Street is still quite a bit higher than that of
  > a startup.

pg's reply: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320447 :

  > The one place data is easy to find is at
  > the high end-- in the Forbes 400-- and there
  > at least that is not the case.

Difficult to say exactly. Both are definitely high-risk industries. The key difference is probably the timespan over which you make your money. A moderately successful entrepreneur might work hard for five years, sell his company for $20M, and get $4M of that. A moderately successful financier might work hard for thirty years, and make $500K - $2M every year that he works. Essentially, successful financiers tend to be older (50s and up) while successful entrepreneurs tend to be younger.

> Essentially, successful financiers tend to be older (50s and up) while successful entrepreneurs tend to be younger.

I think this data can also answer the question. Has any one done any calculations on this front?

That'd be an interesting number as well, but my guess is that financiers win there, too. Even if you don't make it big in finance, you can "fail" into a lot of lower-level jobs that pay around $200-300k. In tech, the fail-out-into-a-salary route tends to get you more like $100-150k.

If you can make the cut at a top investment bank, hedge fund, PE firm, etc, it's fairly trivial to accumulate $1M in liquid assets after 10 years of work. Much much easier than trying to sell your startup for > $1M.

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