Well definitely, and I'd hope every entrepreneur has the confidence in their company to think he will be successful. I just meant, given the hypothetical situation where you knew you would fail, would you still do it? Basically, are you doing it just for money, or is it for more than that?
Your argument doesn't make sense because even if you're doing it just to learn, you're learning entrepreneur skills so you can do it for other reasons later.
I think it still applies. You could rephrase it to say, would you work 80+ hours each week, no pay, for 2 years, just to have a powerful experience and greater knowledge (and the company fails)? It's not a failure from every perspective, but I don't think such a thing exists. Failure to make an exit, or failure to sustain the startup is mostly what I mean.
Where's the motivation for pressing on if there's a certainty of failure i.e. a certainty of your startup not making a profit?
If the motivation comes from an innate desire to learn more about your market, your competitors, etc. then working on a startup begins to look more like academic field research and less like executing a viable business model.
Not to collapse into an argument over semantics, but the very core meaning of the startup concept absolutely rests on the will to survive no matter the odds, a strong desire to succeed and sustain itself as an entity that provides something of value to real customers.
If this is true, then the founders of the startup who got into it only to have a "powerful experience and greater knowledge" would, in essence, be going against the very nature and purpose of a startup.
