This is the back side of much lower success rates. Somewhere like 10-20% of offline businesses survive and thrive for decades, for online startups success rate is much lower. Say, i am 38 and have been coding, and had a large network since i was 18, and i have never seen a person who 'hit it' - even in the most limited sense, meaning consistently made more from his own product(s) than he could do on the Upwork. I mean, i know a ton of such people - some of them make up to $2M a month - but i know them since after, and _because_ they made it (so it can't be used to estimate success rate). Never someone who i knew _before_. And nearly everyone of my coding friends tried. Most tried seriously - the more seriously they tried, the more they lost actually, sometimes being forced to leave the profession completely for the lack of valuable skills (spent 5 years working on own startup with a limited stack and didn't catch up with what the freelancers code with), and need to make money.
Online startups are infinitely scalable, meaning something which is just barely worse than the best probably doesn't survive (see 90%/9%/1% rule), but if it does, it hits big. Neither is true for a restaurant.
It's sort of apples and oranges though, because it's much harder to liquidate and reuse assets from a brick and mortar than it is a software concern.
Every thing I've ever built, in a very tangible way, becomes a stepping stone for me with software. Be it businesses I create or people I work for. Also I can start multiple concerns in parallel and traditional business cant.
Most people, even if they are good at something, cannot start a business of it. That still includes software. There are so many things about running a business that don't directly reflect being good or not. That's excluding people that just aren't any good.
Wanting to be the owner of a business you designed yourself is a crazy persons dream. Software seems to make it more accessible because you can fuck off and get to death much quicker without the same cost, but I bet if you averaged it, what comes out in the wash is the same. A balance of having enough delusion, skill, stickiness, and luck.
I've got a mentor who subletted me some office space for a small thing I had once that I needed a few desks for. Recently he told me how close he was at the time to losing everything and us being there was a desperately needed life raft. Until he told me that, I always thought he was doing me a favor. His business is now at the top of his field. I still can't see the difference. Everything is bullshit until it's real and nothing that is real is permanent. Is success a marker of an IPO or a thing that allows you to take your children on neat vacations and affords time to paint? People only call it a failure when you exclaim you quit or someone else certifies that you've been removed.
This is so true. In the world of online businesses, it does often seem like "winner takes all". This might be because online business can compete globally, so the "winner" can literally take over the world (except China) like facebook did. A restaurant cannot do the same - the closest would be a big franchise like McDonalds.
Online startups are infinitely scalable, meaning something which is just barely worse than the best probably doesn't survive (see 90%/9%/1% rule), but if it does, it hits big. Neither is true for a restaurant.