TL;DR you should be good enough to get into YC and get a job at a FANG, otherwise you have no business doing a startup.
That’s a very dark / elitist / defeatist view for aspiring founders. Many successful business were started by folks that don’t share your background, can’t make it to YC and we’re not superstar programmers. With enough support, any mildly interesting business idea can thrive (see TechStars with their 80%+ survival rate), so while getting into YC increases your odds massively, being a signal of your worthiness as an entrepreneur is a much more fuzzy matter.
A lifestyle business may or may not be worth your time. Small businesses are great, but they don't reap the benefits of scaling massively in quick timeframes like tech unicorns do.
You want to start a unicorn. That's why you are risking your time and your money (and even your health). That's what every investor who gambles away their own money on YOU wants you to do. And look at the qualifications of the successful unicorn startup founders: Stanford PhDs, published mathematicians, 160 IQ -- these types could pass the FAANG bar without even sneezing (they are adding another letter to FAANG!) -- and YC would have invested in all of them (why would PG want to miss the next Google?). As improbable and out-of-reach the YC/FAANG bar might seem to the everyday HN reader, these gateways are child's play for the actual heavy hitters.
Founding a startup is all-or-nothing, and the economy only has room for so many billionaires and triple-digit millionaires. You have to be the absolute best of the best. Just by the numbers, you have to maximize your chances of success, and statistically speaking, the bar is right where it is for a reason.
"Survival" is easy in the startup world. Success is near-impossible hard. It's a poor metric because any founder can live off Soylent and ramen indefinitely clinging onto a nonproductive company that isn't growing (it is all but dead), while ignoring the enormous opportunity cost he or she is personally incurring. Survival in this context really means continuing a hockey-stick trajectory.
You can make single-digit and even double-digit millions over your lifetime doing other things with your time that are less risky and more productive than trying to found a tech startup, even with these qualifications.
> As improbable and out-of-reach the YC/FAANG bar might seem to the everyday HN reader
That's even more condescending than the previous one - and not the point I was bringing up. The majority of successes are based on product innovation, a new business model, market disruption, strategy, growing a niche. Not tech.
All major capitals around the world have hundreds of thousands of millionaires. London alone has more than 350k. With some luck your description might fit 0.01% of the world's successful entrepreneurs.
And my point is that trying to start a company as a FAANG-level engineer is very often not worth the opportunity cost unless you're receiving certain signals (YC, hockey-stick trajectory).
Most millionaires aren't entrepreneurs. As a world-class engineer, you can become a millionaire by working for 5 years at Google/finance/big-4 with very little risk. And giving that up to start your own business is really only worth it for founding a breakout trajectory/unicorn startup. People tend to bias themselves and their abilities, but they need to take a realistic look at the profiles of those successful unicorn founders and use that as a yardstick to evaluate their own potential to avoid wasting their time and money.
And I agree with you that tech is necessary but not sufficient for starting a successful unicorn (the line between "tech" and what you describe as "product innovation" is very blurry). This is Hacker News, after all. Tech-focused investments is their thesis.
Bear in mind that these days having a million doesn't make you rich like it used to, or even able to retire much earlier. The line for super-rich is currently drawn at $30M, then there's only ~4.5k people who qualify in London.
That’s a very dark / elitist / defeatist view for aspiring founders. Many successful business were started by folks that don’t share your background, can’t make it to YC and we’re not superstar programmers. With enough support, any mildly interesting business idea can thrive (see TechStars with their 80%+ survival rate), so while getting into YC increases your odds massively, being a signal of your worthiness as an entrepreneur is a much more fuzzy matter.