[mindvirus]

My econ prof always said that moderate success is the worst outcome for entrepreneurs - failure means you can do something else and learn, and massive success means you are rich, but moderate success can trap you for years.

[jlbnjmn]

I think the same applies to careers, at least for me.

The worst outcome is a moderately good job. A bad job you can quit, a great job you can retire from, but a moderately good job is slow speed entropy with a gradually narrowing window of opportunity.

[robocat]

I view many multi-million dollar businesses as economic failures, because too often:

(a) owners ignore their opportunity costs (especially prevalent for software engineers that can get a huge salary in a safe job)

(b) owners ignore that they need to get extreme returns to cover the large risks that they take of business failure. The standard pass-mark is a 30-times return after 10 years. If one “invests” $y00_000 savings, and one forgoes $x00_000/yr salary by quitting work, one needs to get back say a minimum of ten million. (10_000_000 divided by 30 is $330k, which is a surprisingly easy amount to have “spent”, especially due to what one could earn in a boring 9-5 job).

Edit: I am ignoring other personal benefits or costs, and only considering a startup from a purely economic POV.