If your goal is to make a quick $100K, starting a company is probably the worst idea you can have.
Because the early days feel nothing like the success stories you read online. They feel lonely, messy, and often humiliating. You build a product with excitement, only to see people ignore it. You spend weeks pitching, and most of the time, no one even replies. Money comes in so slowly that you start wondering if this entire dream is just an expensive hobby.
There are days when a job with a steady paycheck looks like paradise.
The world tells you that being a founder gives you freedom. But in the beginning, it feels more like a cage you built for yourself. A cage made of ambition, late nights, and the constant fear that maybe this was all a terrible mistake.
So yes, if you want a comfortable life, there are safer paths. A good job, smart savings, some side investments. You will reach $100K faster and with far less anxiety.
But here is the strange thing.
That same company that barely survives in the beginning is often the only real shot at building something massive. Something that outgrows you. Something that could one day be worth billions and shape lives far beyond your own.
Because while the early years feel painfully slow, something invisible is happening in the background. Every user you win, every mistake you make, every tiny improvement to your product quietly adds up. It does not feel like progress until it suddenly does.
Warren Buffett once said,
"The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."
Startups work the same way. In the beginning, the wins feel too small to matter. Then one day, they are too big to stop.
And that is the paradox.
A startup feels like the worst way to make your first $100K because the early years break you down. But it is probably the only path where, if you survive long enough, you can build something so big that money stops being the point.
People will see the billion-dollar headline one day and think it happened overnight. But you will know about the years when nothing worked, when you almost gave up, when you felt invisible.
And maybe that is why founders keep doing it. Not because it is easy. Not even because it is rational. But because deep down we all want to create something that outlives us.
Something bigger than a safe paycheck. Bigger than ourselves.
