That some people win the lottery is not a good argument for playing the lottery
So, lottery expected worst case: you lose all your money. VC-backed startup expected worst case: you learn a ton and end up no worse financially than you started.
As an aside, whether venture-backed or bootstrapped, having gotten to know a lot of successful founders the characteristic that seems to set them apart is their rate of learning. The best are relentlessly curious, always assume there’s something they don’t know, and seek to learn from as many people as possible.
For anyone not upper class, if you spend 6 or so years chasing a startup and fail, and you’re a good software developer.. once you factor in savings and interest, your total opportunity cost is something like 2-4 million dollars. That’s making a good software dev salary for 6 years and saving some of it. That’s life changing for someone not already rich. And you’d still be learning a lot, plus working a much more relaxing job with time for side projects.
Your broader point is important too: startups are unfortunately too often a luxury of the upper class. It is extremely scary to take a risk when you don’t have a safety net. I was personally broke when we started Cloudflare and had to borrow money from my mom to pay my rent. But I could borrow money from my mom. And I had a mom and a family that if I failed would make sure I didn’t go hungry. My family wasn’t anything close to what I now see really rich looks like, but we weren’t scraping by. Had I not had that safety net I don’t think I’d have had the confidence to start Cloudflare. And I think that’s a real issue with entrepreneurship we don’t talk enough about.
But there are also plenty of people that have worked for a while, provided themselves a safety net and go on the startup journey in their 30s and 40s. Eg. Eric Yuan, who was a eng VP already before zoom.
But I guess those don’t grab the same headline attention.
If you’re learning as much at terrible companies as at good ones, then you’ve had rotten luck. A lot of what I’ve learned at rotten companies is how not to do things, and how important mental health is to physical health. There’s much more negative space than positive space, so you have to learn hundreds of ways not to do something for every handful of ways that actually are sustainable.
If I do something dangerous and win, then a roomful of people copying me have lower odds than I did, not better.