>I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite.
It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed.
In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes.
With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up.
You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.