The first part of your post is a great point. Building a startup, like studying hard in college, builds character/skills/talents/networks/knowledge that might b

The first part of your post is a great point. Building a startup, like studying hard in college, builds character/skills/talents/networks/knowledge that might be valuable to you in future endeavors. These traits 1) help soften the downside of "losing" the "startup lottery" (making it non-analogous to the actual lottery in pure mathematical terms). And 2) perhaps also might help explain any measured difference in outcomes between startup founders and lottery winners. But the "People who are attracted to it..." portion of your post doesn't seem necessarily true and is a pretty harsh/puritan attitude. Do you have any hard empirical data supporting these claims? Defore testing this claim, and for your own sake, we should investigate parent's original question: do we see a similar pattern with startup "winners"? Because if so, your reasoning here might have disturbing entailments for the entrepreneurial set ;-)