> Startups are hard, and risky. But if you lump all the risks together, you are playing the lottery. Talented entrepreneurs identify specific risks and do everything they can to overcome them.<p>Perhaps serial entrepreneurs can do this - I doubt most people that start a business can (unless you are flush with cash).<p>There aren't a lot of those types of people.<p>Most people just start working on some random problem that they want to solve - something that was annoying/cool enough for them to spend their free time/money/effort on.<p>By the time you are considering creating/growing a team, you really don't need to worry about the risk nearly as much - things organically come together - it is, and will probably continue to be, fairly random.<p>I mean if you look at a great many entrepreneurs outside SV, you usually see people with a problem, who don't get a team together, and just work on it until they have a product (a pair or solo). Once they have something that people want, people go through the process of scaling things out to meet demand.