> <i>And that most people take many years, and many failed ventures, to eventually build a sustainable, profitable business.</i><p>I'm not sure how to parse that.<p>Sometimes people need to hear that it's not going to be easy, and they have to stick with it. (How I've sometimes put it, something like: "You know how, when a startup person is telling the story of how they succeeded, and the hardest part was when we thought we wouldn't succeed? This is one of those times. And if we can pull it off, someday we'll tell the story of how we didn't know whether we'd succeed, and no one will really understand until they experience it themselves.")<p>But other times, people need to know that many people will never succeed at building a viable business, no matter how many times they try. There are many factors, including dumb luck. Someone trying to start a business can lose a lot. They should go into it knowing that odds are that they will probably fail to build a viable business, that it's harder than it sounds, so they should take it seriously, and cover all the non-luck bases that they can.