Your sales pitch as a startup is “Turn your back on all that! We’ll work you 100 hours a week, pay you nothing while requring you to live in a freakishly expensive area, give you social status one rung above the homeless, take two to three years of your life, ruin your relationships, and with better than 90% probability subject you to the most crushing defeat of your professional career with no lateral move except into doing the same thing over again.”
Your upside, should you make it to the pinnacle of your profession and do everything right, is theoretically unbounded but, practically speaking, what’s left after the VCs get their share will probably work out to a few million for most founders and barely cover the opportunity cost for early non-founder employees. I don’t mean to say that is totally insane, but it requires that you have the risk-tolerance slider bumped to the maximum.