There's a fundamental difference between 'there are more financiers than start-up founders in the Fortune 400' and 'a greater percentage of financiers in America make the Fortune 400 than start-up founders in America'.
Using extreme example to make my point, if 0.001% of all 'financiers' made the Fortune 400 and 5.000% of all start-up founders did, no-one would claim that 211 v 59 means much because of the asymmetrical volume of the candidate pools.
The percentages won't be that stark, of course. Are there 4 times as many financiers as start-up founder? I would suggest more (many, many more) which would indicate that being a start-up founder makes it more likely to hit that measure of financial success than being a financier, based on those figures.
I make no comment about the relevance of this to the original discussion and pg's right or wrongness, which I was not a part of.
That depends a lot what you consider a startup founder. If you consider a startup founder as anyone who quits their day job to start a business, I'd bet that there are many more startup founders than financiers. If you consider only people in the technology field, the numbers drop significantly. If you consider people in the technology field who start a project that may become a business, but don't restrict to those who quit their day jobs, the numbers balloon again.
I could look up these numbers, but they really don't tell you all that much. If you're a Xoogler with venture capital in Silicon Valley, your odds are much better than if you're a college dropout in Indiana who's playing around with Rails in his free time. It's silly to lump both "founders" into the same category.
Then do you consider only venture-funded technology startups? After all, most of the folks on the technology list got there through venture funding. Do you consider only startups where the founders quit their day job? Do you consider ones where the founders eventually quit their day jobs, but not until their startup had traction in the marketplace? (That would include Apple and EBay, FWIW.) Do you consider any technology project that may become a startup?
The original thread-starter wants to know the chances of making the Forbes 400, given that he becomes a tech entrepreneur or financier. He rightly points out that this depends a lot on the denominator - but the denominator depends a lot on how you slice the categories of "tech entrepreneur" and "financier". There are a large number of factors besides entrepreneurship that alter the odds, and many of them alter the odds a lot more than the mere fact that you've started a company.
I don't blame the college kids. At least right now, our capitalist society deems their brains are better spent finding the next good $10M trade as opposed to helping ship Office 2010 or becoming grad students in math / physics / CS.
I don't consider shipping Office 2010 a lofty goal... Come on, we are trying to make the world a better place.
As someone currently doing two migrations from Outlook (I finally got approval to get rid of Windows on my corporate notebook and my wife is moving her Exchange-based mail to an IMAP server) I can say any shipment of Office 2010 prevented means at least one more happy person ;-)
As for the other options, making the next 10M trade or becoming a grad student, I think you should follow your heart.
Using extreme example to make my point, if 0.001% of all 'financiers' made the Fortune 400 and 5.000% of all start-up founders did, no-one would claim that 211 v 59 means much because of the asymmetrical volume of the candidate pools.
The percentages won't be that stark, of course. Are there 4 times as many financiers as start-up founder? I would suggest more (many, many more) which would indicate that being a start-up founder makes it more likely to hit that measure of financial success than being a financier, based on those figures.
I make no comment about the relevance of this to the original discussion and pg's right or wrongness, which I was not a part of.