> probabilities involved with your decision
While this is a good general approach to life IMHO as well — if you mean "be rational, not just emotional" and "work on your cognitive biases, seek objectivity" — it might also prove terribly counterproductive in this context.
It would take a book or five but briefly:
- you just can't use statistics when they say "95% fail", otherwise you just don't do startups, ever. With that mindset, joining an established company is more likely to "succeed" for you and maximize serenity.
- another stat for you: most entrepreneurs fail "about twice" before making it, i.e. you'll probably fail 1-3 times for sure before entering the 5% of those who create a profitable business. Trick #1, thus: you can roll the dice several times (consider 2-5 years per "real try").
- most valuable ideas were either not identified (rarely) or not well executed (often) before someone eventually nails a product. You thus iterate quickly on the market (MVP, feedback, lean cycles, etc) to find your best fit curve, to hone in on the product that works. Chances are you'll find a local minimum, not "the best", you'll pivot, you'll reconsider, you'll maybe focus entirely on a subsystem, a 'feature' become 'product' — think how Docker, the company, appeared after the same name product.
The reality is that a "fast scaling startup" a la California is rare and a moonshot most often — unicorns and all that — but a diligently conducted, ground, sustained effort to make a business growing organically to reach sustainability for you and a few others in 2-5 years is a realistic goal (but all things considered, e.g. probably not on your first try, likely 10 years after you began for the first time).
I don't want to claim that it's easy to create a business, it's by far harder than working the jobs in most cases; but SMBs make up anywhere from 80 to 90% of our economies, they're the real bread and butter of our collective wealth, and these 'small' entrepreneurs are our true heroes. Not many of them make it big, and that's the 'gamble' you speak of, but it's not the only way, nor is it at all required to go down that path.