Survivorship Bias

When I created my first company my parents told me about how hard it was going to be, how few succeed... On the contrary I found it was way easier and natural than studying engineering was, for example, and hundreds or thousands of people could do it.

I found most serious people succeed in business. It is not that hard to become a millionaire, way easier than being a salaried person, tens of thousands of times easier than winning a lottery.

On the lottery you have absolutely no control about the outcome, on real life you can "cheat" and control anything.

For example, one of the great discoveries in my life is that in business if you don't know how to do something you can just hire the person to teach you or your team or just do it for you.

That felt like cheating because I had been trained all my years on school and job that you have to do all your job yourself, regardless you being good at it or not.

That control makes it extremely easy to do things. For example you could work with the people you want to work with, that makes your life way easier and enjoyable than if you are externally forced to work with people you don't want to work with.

In the startup world some people want to be billionaires, and that is probably akin to winning the lottery. But I know some billionaires and do not envy them. Traveling everywhere with armed escort because someone could kidnap your children, so you live in a bunker isolated from everyone. Everywhere you go someone wants something from you, a loan , to invest in them. Banks harassing you all the time. Not knowing if people is around you just for your money.

Sure. If it is not so hard, everyone would do it. If everyone was a millionaire, who would do actual unpleasant work? Who would clean, run hospitals, build infrastructure? Who would work for your startup so you can make money?

Your comment is such an example of survivorship bias!

Capitalism is a competition. You won, good for you. Don't tell the rest they can win too, that's insulting. You won because someone lost.

Do you have proof of that assertion?

I'd tend to largely agree with the OP, although I think he's overstating the point a bit. It's certainly not a great deal harder to get to the millionaire point as an entrepreneur than as a conventional salaried worker - assuming you have the appropriate character traits. If you're a self-starter with a fair amount of willpower and the ability to effectively learn, lifestyle businesses (as distinct from unicorns) are not massively tricky to grow. They're not easy, and there's definitely a learning curve, but it's on the "doable" end of the scale.

(Background: I've built a few, and I teach other people to build them.)

Addendum: we should probably also start by defining "failed" here. If you mean "way more people's first businesses fail than succeed", I'd agree with you, absolutely. If you mean "way more people have started more than 8 businesses following best practice and have had zero successes than have had any success", I'm much more skeptical. It's an axiom - even in the talks by famous successful people mentioned in the comic - that you generally need a few attempts to get the hang of launching and running anything.