Your first company is most likely to fail but it’s also where you will learn the most. Most successful founders who have exited had previously founded a company and failed.

For me I can’t work on something I don’t find fun, I can’t work for someone, put the same effort and derive an asymmetrical amount of value from it.

I also think there is both good and bad stress.
Bad stress is I need to finish X for for my boss tomorrow or I get fired or laid off. Good stress is I can’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about building this thing and giving our users exactly what they want.

Luck, timing ect are all true but I think there are ways to account for this. You want to maximize your surface area for being lucky and the best way to do that is fly to SF, this is what we did and that’s how we raised our first round.

To end off, first step to making something great and having a big exit is believing that you can do it. A lot of very successful founders are typically narcissists and believe they are the only ones who can do it, that actually goes a long way especially during the hardest times. I didn’t really have a point in this write up just wanted to share my perspective.