[cpkpad]

I think you're actually missing the point.

"Competent to execute" is far more important than "working hard enough." Elon Musk splits his life between Tesla, Solarcity (now part of Tesla, but essentially independent), The Boring Company, SpaceX, and Neuralink. He also dabbles in a slew of other projects. That means he works at most 8 hours per week on each of those. Is that working hard? It's hardly working.

Unless you've done a circuit where you've been in many roles in companies, and have experience in tech, marketing, management, sales, finance, legal, etc. running your first startup is almost guaranteed to bomb, but you're also almost guaranteed to pick up some of that experience. The basic model -- many risks, a few successes -- is great for both personal growth and being a successful entrepreneur. Indeed, I'll say Elon is partially successful because he can leverage experience across those companies.

I do agree many people aren't in a position to do this. Restrictive employment agreements, financial obligations, and family obligations certainly can eat you up alive.

[pdimitar]

Elon Musk is a huge outlier.

And it is you that is missing the point. Many of us cannot try enough times to succeed. As stated in another comment, if I try 2-3 times and fail I am back to not only square one, but maybe on the street.

[cpkpad]

A lot of the more successful entrepreneurs I know operate a lot like Elon Musk. The basic model seems to be to:

* Start a project in spare time

* Validate technology (prototype something)

* Validate market demand (talk to customers)

* Validate business model (estimate costs/revenues/etc.)

* Otherwise mitigate risk as appropriate for the business

Most of these are pretty deep dives; it's not a one-evening project. In most cases, people (like Elon) become minor domain experts. On the other hand, these are also not job-quitting deep dives; one isn't on the street if one fails.

Perhaps for every few dozen such deep dives, something which looks really plausible comes up. From that point, it's largely a matter of good execution.

I think the key difference between my friends and Elon is that Elon tries to do Really Big Things which change the world. My friends might start a business which e.g. applies machine vision to a new vertical, or adds some kind of automation to some industrial process, or similar.

At this point, all have lives, families, etc. and aren't working 70+ hour weeks. Failure rates for their businesses aren't all too high either. Most business they start seem to at least pay the bills for the boss and the employees (with a few much bigger successes, and a few failures).

I'm not saying that's most folks, but that is most folks in my community. But they've universally managed people before, they can code well, they can do math well, they've built out a reasonable network of contacts, etc.