[stilist]

There’s no risk in leaving stable employment for a lifestyle that can ruin your finances and relationships, and leave you completely burnt out?

Startups can be huge successes personally and financially, but there’s definitely risk.

[hfthrowaway]

No risk if you're a VC. Best case, you're net worth increases by orders of magnitude - worst case, you still earn a hefty management fee on all committed capital. If someone else spends five years of their life on a failed venture, its just one company in your portfolio.

Nothing wrong with entrepreneurship. I just find it grating when the benefits are expounded by people who take the exact opposite deal, in terms of asymmetric risk.

[elias]

Not quite. If you are a venture partner and you don't produce returns on the fund, you're out of there. The entire partnership needs to show gains on the fund. In my experience, it's actually pretty easy raising money (either from advertisers, investors, or sponsors) but what's hard is ensuring you give a return on that money. You can measure the success of a venture fund not on how much money they raise the first time, but how much they've raised in total over successive rounds.

[elias]

Let me qualify that: as a founder, of course there is risk. That's what makes you a founder. And that's why not everyone is cut out to be a founder: you need to be mad. (And there's madness is a bit of all of us, but as a twenty something bachelor, being a mad man affects me less than a 40 something father of three.)

My response was in the context of being an employee. I was an employee at a 5,000 person consulting firm in Australia when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and I had more fear losing my job then then when I moved to recession-plagued America in 2009 to work at a search-engine startup (and Australia has been one of the strongest economies in that period since). In fact, I was paid more (in salary, not counting options), given more responsibility, and enjoyed life more.