FWIW, this essay had an impact on me in 2008, and I started my startup in early 2009.

I was working in NYC, and on Wall St (as a programmer). I was 2 years out of college, so 25 or so, and had only minimal savings and some college debt left to pay off.

The "conventional wisdom" in my circle of friends was, "This is a really bad time to quit a stable job and start a small company, because the entire economy might collapse." I had nothing but evidence in front of me: from my office window one day, I could see streams of hundreds of laid off people leaving the Lehman Brothers building, with cardboard boxes of personal office items in their hands. Friends of mine who were smart and hard workers were getting laid off from their NYC jobs left and right.

When I worked up the courage to quit and pursue the startup, and I announced it to my colleagues at work, quite a few of them took me aside and said, "I get that you already made this decision, but I'm really worried about you given what's going on in the economy."

I think pg's essay, as well as the general mindset of YCombinator, helped me and my co-founder have the attitude of, "We'll try this, and it might fail, but if it succeeds, it'll be awesome. And if it fails, despite how bad the economy is, we can still fall back on just working our butts off to find another job."

Anyway, it wasn't easy, for sure. Though we managed to get seed accelerator financing ($20K) from Dreamit Ventures in Philly in Summer 2009, we then bootstrapped for 2 years in the startup wilderness until our seed financing round of $800K in 2011. I don't think most people, young and frugal or not, would last that long on non-employer healthcare or with only consulting/freelance income to pay the bills. I wrote about that financial reality here:

https://amontalenti.com/2011/04/02/not-for-the-faint-of-hear...

Also, zooming forward to 2020, I think the current economy is much more startup friendly than 2008-2009. In the period we started in, seed financing was not very mature -- we were still living in the shadow of the 2000-2001 crash. NYC had a very small tech startup community in 2008-2009. The 2008 crash, being a "financial" crisis, also depressed venture capital investing at the same time. By contrast, this Covid-19 recession has split investors, where retail/consumer stocks are losing money, but tech stocks are growing by leaps and bounds, and many investors are now trained by the success of low valuation seed investments from the 2008-2010 era, which eventually led to IPOs and exits in our recent tech bull market. So, if I weren't still running my company and if I were working for a BigCo like I was in 2008, I would definitely start a company now, because there's really no downside whatsoever. That is, no downside except the opportunity cost of your salaried job. (One other counterintuitive aspect, though, is that, perhaps, starting a startup now is such an obvious decision that you'll be competing with a lot of other seed stage founders, assuming they are as rational as I describe here :-) ...)

Also, about a year ago I provided a little advice for how to bootstrap your company if you do get started and you are not of any means. Hope it helps someone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21506297