Common Misconception
One common perception among common people is that startup founders would become overnight millionaires - that can hardly be further from the truth. The ideal scenario doesn't happen most of the time.
If one founds a startup based on the assumption that his product or his contract projects would make his and his team overnight millionaires, then the very founding philosophy of that startup, is wrong. The superficial reason is that it's a very poor bet - it doesn't happen very often.
The real reason is that it breaks the team.
Why?
The reason of existence of such a company is making short term profit, so people joined the company in expectation of short term profit. What really happens with startups is that, 99.99% of the time, you won't see that short term profit in the beginning. For the remaining 0.01%, the revenue may drop significantly after just a few months (e.g. your army of Facebook users, just happened to have found something new to play with).
What happens to the team, then? It breaks. Team members expecting to get short term profits would go to do other activities giving them short term money.
Never Lose the Team
The most valuable thing that anyone participating in a startup can gain, is the team - it is risk-free and does not come with an interest rate. It's ok to lose money, it's ok to lose customers, but never lose the team.
One may be born awesome - one may have played computer games all day yet he got straight A at school; he went to exam venues with an evil maniacal laughter; he's a 1-in-1000 genius and he knows it.
But, being a 1-in-1000 genius, also means there're something like 1.4 million people who're just as evil-maniacally-smart as him in China, alone. The chance at success of one person alone, is never too good. And then it's impossible for most people to be a 1-in-1000 evil maniacally laughing genius, by definition.
But if you've managed to find a team of 5, who're "only" 1-in-50 smart - not really hard to find in universities coz they did the pre-screening for you - then you've just probabilistically got yourself a massive advantage over that lone evil maniacally laughing genius. And, obviously, 5 people can do more than just one person, and 5 people can specialize their talents (e.g. engineering, project management, market research, sales, etc.) into different areas of business so each one of them is less distracted while running a company.
Why Startup?
As a young 20-something, which includes myself, it doesn't really matter that the first or second startup attempts fizzle out. We may be poor and lack the social power of our older friends who've got high ranking political or corporate seats. But we have time.
We can do experiments, fail, think, try again; systematically eliminate things and ideas that do not work; build relationships and knowledge; build an awesome team that trust each other; look out for opportunities. Try, until succeed, the details don't matter. You can work without an office, you can work a part time job in McDonald's, you can even have another job at Google or IBM - it doesn't matter. Just stay in the game and snowball your advantage. You don't even have to be technically owning a company - e.g. you can be doing an open project in your free time and build a profit making service around it later - as long as you're making progress with your team, it's good. There's always a way, no matter how devious.
The biggest advantage of a 20-something is time. We are the ones who have the luxury to think and act long term, and reap the results. Have the cake and eat it. Just like we have the exponent advantage in the compound interest game, we also have the advantage in snowballing the talent and the experience. As anybody who has played any multiplayer game that involves two brain cells would know, the winners in the end are always those who took all possible advantages that the game can offer them. And that is the real meaning behind founding a startup for a 20-something - snowball advantages not available to our less aggressive friends - the team, the knowledge, the experience. When we win, it won't be because of fairness.
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