This seems to be the narrative that the author wants to promote:

"Startups run on an alchemy of ignorance and amnesia that is incredibly important to experimentation. Most startups fail. The vast, vast majority of startup employees will never exercise their options, let alone become millionaires while doing it. Mathematically, talented individuals are certainly better off financially going into a profession or working at a large tech company, where pay is higher and more secure."

You will hear again and again and again how "Gee only some choice few people get 'rich' in a startup, everyone else gets 'screwed.'" and people will tell you how the whole "Silicon Valley Myth" is just that, smoke and mirrors designed to dupe fools into giving up their valuable youth so that someone else can get rich.

There is a real problem with the narrative though, its the pesky facts that the Bay Area counties actually have lots of people who have a net worth over a million dollars and a if you count the ones that got that way here and then moved to places like Oregon, Washington, etc. Its an even larger number.

That is because while the typical startup may fail, such that 1 in 10 or even 1 in 15 have successful outcomes, it is "easy" as an employee to work in 5 or 6 of them for the first few years of your career. Just like universities there is a cohort of people about the same age as you, they are all moving through the world, getting older, and then dying. If you are in certain parts of the world the overall probability that you will come out richer than the rest of your cohort is much higher. Three areas that seem to consistently produce durable net worth, banking, politics, and technology.

Next lets talk about lying, which is making a statement you know to be false. Now buy a PowerBall lottery ticket, hand it to your special friend and tell them "This Lottery ticket is a winner." are you lying?

The actual state of things is that the lottery ticket is both a winner and a loser, and doesn't actually become a winning ticket until after a future event, the ability to predict accurately is completely unknown. Your statement has a probability of 1 in 179,000,000 of being true, which means it isn't a lie.

So is this just counting angels on a pin? Yes and no. The reality is that as adults we live in a probability filled universe, will you die today on the Freeway driving to work? Yes you will. Unless you don't.

As a founder, the only way to stay sane, is to invest only in outcomes that are positive, regardless of their probability, until they are proven otherwise. So you absolutely believe that you're going to get the next round of funding to take you to the next level, but that other path doesn't really isn't one where you want to be.

That said, having multiple paths to the winning answer is much better than having only one. Just like having ten lottery tickets is better than just having one, in terms of likelyhood of success, plans that include funding and plans that include restructuring but both end up across the goal should be in your mind. When you have a number of difficult things (with unknown outcomes) in your future that is called "stacking risk", you can succeed but the next step failing kills you, Etc. So as a founder you work to figure out all of the paths that meet at the success side of the equation, all of the events and their outcomes that open or close paths to you, and you run like hell for the goal.

Nobody accuses the quarterback of lying when he tells the wide receiver he is going to through the pass to him, only to be sacked behind his own line of scrimmage.

Startups are risky endeavors in an environment that doesn't care a bit about whether they succeed or fail. And there are a lot of things you can't know about how the future is going to go. But it is also not, in general, a game of abuse where some privileged elite are fleecing the chumps out of their lunch money, despite what some disgruntled people feel about it.