[il]

This post is based on so many false assumptions that it's meaningless. Most small business owners/bootstrappers are NOT millionaires, most are just barely scraping by. Less than 3% of small businesses make $250K or more in profit.

(http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/09/boehner_c...)

So if you consider "failure to make over $250K" as failure, 97% of small businesses are failing.

[melanie_io]

That is a fair point. However, even if you adjust the assumptions for expected value to be 3% (vs 25%, which is what I use), it is still an expected value of $43,000, over 14x greater than that of your average "I want to be the next Instagram" app. I wanted to use 2 hypothetical examples with some reasonable assumptions just to show the staggering difference in probabilities of each scenario.

[il]

Yes, but then the expected value is less than getting a job.

[adambratt]

I think you may have missed the point here. Her point was that there are way more revenue generating businesses that have become successful without VC funding than those that have taken VC funding. Granted the successful VC funded companies will almost always be more successful due to the very nature of VC.

Furthermore, most small businesses are local service based businesses. The average for profitable web small businesses is probably quite a bit higher than those as you have access to a much much larger market.