The sell of founding a startup is that, yes, most fail, but your backers make sure you fail up (as long as you didn't break the law in some horrendous way). If your startup tanks or your investors replace you, they make sure you get a 250k+ position in a venture fund (if that relaxed job is what you want, after the 90-hour weeks of founding a startup) or an executive position in an existing software company. That's the implicit promise that's made to founders, but I don't know how often it's delivered.

I have no idea what the data say. It'd be interesting to see where people end up 15 years after failing out of a funded startup. The GovWorks guys did well, though. It's engineers that seem to eat the pain when startups fail.