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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

It’s similar to wanting to start your own company: the odds to succeed are grim.

Or surviving as a book author, or making it as an actor/actress in Hollywood, or ... - they simply have a dream and it is quite hard to find the right timing for giving up such dreams.

Succeeding as an author, actor, or tennis player is a much greater challenge than starting a company. There are millions and millions of companies succeeding well enough to keep their owners afloat. The chances for creative careers and professional sports, meanwhile, are abysmal.

This is not true. The odds of becoming a unicorn are grim. The odds of getting a decent wage is actually quite high if you ask me.

In Spain 60% of companies don't survive the 5 year mark [1]. That's what I think when people say that making a company is hard.

[1] https://www.eleconomista.es/economia/noticias/12101579/01/23...

That’s way better odds than being a top tier professional athlete.

If 60% of companies fail that means if you start 6 businesses then you have a 95% probability of having a successful business.

Only 1.6% of college football players transition to the NFL.

I don’t think they’re independent events. Bayesian priors would say that if you have five failed businesses then your chances of being successful on number 6 are probably less than 60%

I disagree. A bunch of founders out there have a string of failures surrounded by their successes.

Here is a list of a few of them: https://press.farm/startups-fail-founders-bounced-back-and-b...

Some of these founders had two or more failed businesses before reaching success.

The supply outstrips the demand. The number of NFL teams is tightly controlled to extract the most amount of money from its consumers. More teams, less money for each owner and players but a higher % of college football players having a shot at a career.

Assuming the success is independent.

Well, it’s much more independent than being a pro athlete. By design you only have one to two chances to go pro at a sport. You can’t go back in time to your prime playing age, you can’t go back in time to train at a different sport during your youth.

For business owners, starting a business is a matter of filing a few pieces of paperwork. Starting a business is quite literally an independent event from starting the business prior.

Maybe like running a restaurant... Other businesses if they are sensible to start with are lot less risky.

You can be "less risky" than a restaurant while still having dismal chances of success though. Nobody who starts a business expects that it'll be bankrupt within a few years, yet statistically some 90% are. The worst cases are when the company manages along for years and then still goes under. I was contracting for a 10 year old company of ~30 people last year and they just had to fire 20 of those and will still almost certainly go bankrupt. They weren't in a business you'd call "risky" either.

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