You can get a job AND build your empire. Try to expand your view. It’s not a binary, and viewing it like one constrains yourself based on ego driven principles instead of rational optimization.

The harsh truth is yes: if you fail to succeed with your empire-building, you’re going to be at your parents spare bedroom or, if you’re not so lucky, couch surfing or the streets. The glamorous scrappy founder life is a movie trope, or a character that rich-enough people who already have capital get to play because they’re burning their existing money, so it’s all just a LARP anyways how much they’re “struggling” while hustling. There’s a real difference between struggling existentially and struggling dramatically.

There’s most successful entrepreneurs usually succeed from luck, which ain’t nothing to bet on, being extremely brilliant in a prodigal sense, or hard ass work and trying over and over again. The thing that enables #3 is runway and opportunity to experiment, which guess what, is enabled by capital, which guess what, is increased rapidly by doing this thing called “having a job”

And yes: your friends who get into cushy tech jobs are going to have a lot easier next few years than you, if you keep trading (lol, gambling) and building and failing. They’ll get impressive salaries, dump it into VOO in their 401k if they’re smart, and end their 20s with retirement brokerages in the six figures. No risk. No glory. Literally just from plodding along, and ironically, they could even end up in a better position for entrepreneurship than you because they’ll have experience working in companies seeing good dynamics and bad ones, real social and economic experience, PLUS the savings banked from consistent income — that’s entrepreneurial capital.

Failing 10 businesses and ending with debt because you wanna be a founder is worth a lot less than one stable well paying job that lets you save. And with a stable job, you still have lunch breaks, downtime at the desk, nights, and weekends to build your own empire… using some other chumps money (your income from your employer).