There is a saying we all know but often ignore. One needs money to make money. Large volumes of money/wealth can magnify one’s chances of success(or careless failure) faster than any other apporoach.
it's worse than that .. certain nexus points (social,financial,legal) like Palo Alto California, are exactly the fertile grounds for rampant valuation escalation. When "guy with some financial safety" starts a business selling lawn mowers with a new motor.. or perhaps builds them to sell.. no way at all is that going to experience the exponential growth seen in the past 20 years in Silicon Valley valuations. There are thousands of easy examples of solving real world problems, in real ways, that will not scale financially in the ways seen around Silicon Valley.
I worked with a founder who tried probably a dozen ideas before the one that made it, and each time, he had his relatively wealthy family to backstop the effort and provide a sofa to sleep on when it failed. Eventually, one of those businesses made him very well off, and he became an insufferable libertarian. Whenever he had a company pep talk for the employees, he would go on and on about how he started the company all by himself with nothing, and built it into this big thing that employs all of you, blah, blah, blah. No acknowledgment of the incredible fortune needed to weather all the previous failures.
I looked it up: 250k in 1995 is about 520k today.