[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.