[avar]

    > The reason so many people are content with being employees,
    > rather than striking it out on their own, has to do (at least in
    > part) with their risk tolerance.

I'm a happy employee, and for me the reason I'm not founding my own startup isn't a matter of personal risk at all.

It's that now pretty much all day I can do what I like doing (programming) and come home at the end of the day and wind down from work.

If you're starting your own company you have to worry about everything involved in that tiny company from acquiring clients to managing staff to building the product, if that's something you want that's fine, but it's not something I'm particularly interested in.

I also very much enjoy working on programming problems at the scale you can only find in bigger companies, if I were to start my own company now and it grew like crazy at best I could get back to the level of problems I solve at work now in 10 years or so.