Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich

I have a new guest post on GigaOm today, called Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich. Here's an excerpt:

One of the unfortunate side effects of all the publicity and hype surrounding startups is the idea that entrepreneurship is a guaranteed path to fame and riches. It isn’t. Building a startup is incredibly hard, stressful, chaotic and –- more often than not –- results in failure. That doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile thing to do, just that it’s not a good way to make money.

A more rational career path for money-making is one that rewards effort, in the form of promotions, increased security, salary and status. Startups, unfortunately, punish effort that doesn’t yield results. In fact, the biggest source of waste in a startup is building something nobody wants. While in an academic R&D lab, creation for creation’s sake will often get you praise, in a startup, it will often put you out of business.

So why become an entrepreneur instead of developing technology in an R&D lab? Three reasons: change the world, make customers’ lives better and create an organization of lasting value. If you only want to do one of these things, there are better options. But only startups combine all three.

Take this fictional example of a Seedcamp attendee (actually a composite), which I will refer to as Hairbrush 2.0...

Read the rest of Myth: Entrepreneurship Will Make You Rich

Also take a look at the great Hacker News discussion of this essay. It includes several gems, including this comment from davidu:

1) Being an entrepreneur, for me, isn't about being wealthy, it's about being successful.
2) Rich is a variable term, and intended to be so.
Entrepreneurship may not make you wealthy, but it can certainly make you rich.
I enjoy the freedom and independence afforded by starting EveryDNS and OpenDNS. Both contain a passion for a system I love, the DNS, and both have let me help millions of consumers around the world. I even like knowing I control the DNS for millions and millions of Internet users. That's an awesome responsibility and it certainly makes me feel rich about everything I do.
And when it comes to money, Eric is only somewhat right. He says you should get a job that rewards and promotes effort. But lots of lawyers and finance kids in New York thought they had stable jobs that would make them rich. Ask them today and most will tell you a different story altogether. Now they hate their jobs and have no job security or path to becoming really wealthy.
So like I said, being entrepreneur, for me, isn't about being wealthy, it's about being successful. That's a measuring stick that's far more important.

and this one from gits_tokyo:

People that I've spoken with in the past more often than not associated the idea of me doing a startup in the tech industry with gaining massive wealth. While I may entertain this, deep down I find it lacking as there's so much more than wealth to be had.
How about, living in a world... some distant future from the everyday-everyday where day-by-day you toil piecing together a vision, one day injecting it into the present, in order to influence a whole new set of social behaviors while also unfolding valuable opportunities. How about, the day of flipping that proverbial switch, releasing this vision out in the wild. How about, the potential of millions interacting with your vision, it becoming a staple part of a users online experiences. There's something undeniably provoking about all this, rush of my life.
Wealth, although a welcomed aside pales in comparison. Hell I would even go so far as to say, in a world where sex is constantly peddled as a cure all, let me say it, sex pales in comparison to the feeling I get from being an entrepreneur.