Also, startups, where startup means creating a new unproven solution intended to achieve exponential growth, are unfathomably hard. It's hard (in my experience) to stay motivated in the face of startup hardships when one's primary objective is money.
And it all depends on your financial goals.
Want low 6-figures a year? Get a career.
Want medium 6-figures a year? Bootstrap a business.
Want 7-figures a year? Take VC money.
And yes, the success rates get progressively worse, but if your goal is to average $500k-$1M+/year over the next 5 years, your chances of making that as an employee are probably far less than your chances of making that owning a startup.
Exactly. Startup is the only way to make money, while being reliably preserved from management errors which you can't prevent or compensate for.
You can join an early Facebook, but that's a luck game, not a systematic approach where you'll actually influence chances.
It's a term without a strict definition.
I'm not sure if I can agree with that. In general that may be true, but I would have to say most people do something they don't like 'just for the money' at some point in their life. Something like working as a kid for minimum wage in a store. It's most likely that you are just working there for money.