If the article made sound easy to make $10k/month that was an error on my part. It is not easy, it's very hard. But no where near as hard as building a successful business on VC investment. Don't forget, after you get the investment you're only just starting out... 8 out of 10 VC funded projects fail.
I think one also needs to consider the success and failure profiles in each. What do success and failure entail, and what are their implications for your career? The attraction of the get-rich-or-die-quickly company is that, if it doesn't make you rich enough never to have to work again, at least you can walk away from it and hopefully spin your story positively enough to get career credit, for your next job, for the time you spent there.
Taking VC and making $120k/year, which is low-average for a VC-funded firm's CEO, and then failing after three years, doesn't entail much financial loss. And unless the failure is catastrophic and obviously reflects badly on a single founder, it's not a huge career hit. Sure, it's 3 years working very hard for middling pay, but there are worse things in the world. Depending on how one is able to bounce back from the failure, it may have been 3 years very well spent.
As for lifestyle businesses, no VC is going to fund a lifestyle business; it's just not what they do. And bank loans are out because they make onerous personal-liability requirements, so scratch that. This leaves two options. (1) Don't quit your day job. Risk is minimal, but I'd be shocked if more than 2% of these also-employed "entrepreneurs" take off. (2) Quit your day job, and put personal savings at risk. This is a lot riskier, financially, than founding a VC startup if you have sufficient social connections to know (before you start) that you'll be funded. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and if you don't have those social connections you'll be eating savings either way while you hunt for funding, but it does mean that it's costly.
There is also option (3), somewhere between (1) and (2):
Explore the problem space and make a start while working for your previous employer. Slowly reduce the number of hours you are working (i.e contract vs fulltime).
Once you are getting some interest / traction or feeling more confident, switch over to (2) - now much less risky. Go fulltime with a 1/2 built business with several potential customers and perhaps a couple of paying ones. You are now much more attractive to investment.
That depends on your location and social connections. If you're in the Bay Area and have social connections, you can get funded out of the gate. If you're on the East Coast and just out of college, you're going to have to prove yourself before you get funded and, yes, you're looking at at least a year of unpaid hard work. It's all about contacts, and if you have none, you've got an uphill battle-- especially if you're not in the Valley.
Income-wise, a startup is generally a step down, but a tolerable one for most people. If you're 22 and without VC contacts, you can work for next to nothing for a year or two, make contacts by hanging out in the Valley, and start pitching when you have a product. If you're 36 and have a family to feed, but have VC connections, you can usually get early seed funding and pay yourself $100k annual salary, which is low for someone with those kinds of contacts but enough to live on.
When it is impossible is if you're 36 and have a family to feed, but don't have VC contacts. You can't afford to take a year or two off to prove yourself (which an outsider will have to do) but you don't have the contacts necessary to step immediately into a $100k/year salary with just an idea.
