[trhway]

What i see around, ie. friends & acquaintances, is at some point, usually after a good stint at one or a couple places a midlevel manager/executive decides "time to make next level of money", and together with several like minded guys and established good connections they pick up some investors from a line up of the investors eager to get in, and the rest is a well defined process. There is no risk, no giving up of any live, reputation, etc. There is only improvement on all of these fronts. If their venture doesn't make it big, it will be acquired with a nice premium and they would end up somewhere at the same or higher positions anyway. One such is already a unicorn in a pretty short, even by SV standards, time. List of the advisers/investors and other involved people of another such venture, started pretty recently, is impossible to read while maintaining steady breath :)

[ykler]

It sounds like you're complaining, but if it is really so easy, just become a founder. In a way, it is impossible for there to be an unfair distribution of wealth between people who do A and people who do B if everyone has the choice whether to do A or B.

[trhway]

>it is really so easy, just become a founder.

you've missed the important point. It isn't for everybody. I specifically mentioned that it is already successful people with a lot of good connections. Thus such a startup is just the next step in the career progression. For a plain engineer, like me for example, who can't make even a CTO/VP of engineering of a small company or a Director/division Chief Architect/etc. at a BigCo creating a startup would be exactly or even worse than described by grand-grand-parent. There is a reason that early stage VCs, for example YC, invest in people, not ideas/business. One of the friends got invested with "just name the number" amount right on the spot the moment he mentioned that he got his own startup even without telling what his startup is intended to do (of course there were due diligence done by small people afterwards before things formalized on paper) Where is couple other friends, engineers more like me, who went through a very harsh interviews at those few VCs who agreed to listen to them and got, unsurprisingly, nothing, and still sitting as engineers.

>It sounds like you're complaining,

there is huge difference between recognizing reality and saying that the reality is unfair (which it just can't be by virtue of being the reality)

[mikeokner]

Starting a business isn't for everybody, but not for the reason you stated. You're making the mistake of believing the VC hype. You don't need and probably shouldn't seek funding until you can articulate a need. So suggesting that you can't start a business because you won't get funded when you don't actually have any need for funding is absurd.

Starting a business isn't for everybody because it's a lot of stressful work. You have to wake up early and stay up late laying the foundation while your friends or spouse or kids or work are vying for your attention. You have to scrape together your savings or max out a couple credit cards to actually launch your product. Once you start hiring you are responsible for putting food on other people's tables. And even once you start making money, you have no idea what you're doing pretty much every step of the way.

If you actually do want to start a business, just fucking sit down and do it. There are a ton of profitable, bootstraped SaaS companies out there. Build a product, pay for the first couple months of hosting out of pocket, bill yearly, profit. (Notice "get funded" isn't a required step.) Complaining that VCs probably won't love you is just an excuse to take the path of least resistance and stay mediocre.

[ykler]

OK, sorry that I misunderstood you. But for what it's worth, lots of people with no connections have bootstrapped or gotten into incubators and then gotten funded or just hustled and got funded. For instance, just yesterday I talked to a woman with no connections or track record who got seed funding for her startup, but it took her over a year of "making friends with investors". Obviously it is a lot easier if you are well connected though.

[csin]

You wanna be careful with your usage of quotation marks in context of woman. You make it sound like she slept her way to a startup.

This is 2017, the year of Harvey Weinstein.

[sgs1370]

"There is no risk"

What? You're wrong.

[trhway]

please specify at least one risk.