Do it for the lifestyle.
Entrepreneurship is said to be long hours, lots of sacrifice, total devotion to your business and nothing else. That sounds a lot like marriage and kids. That sounds a lot like an extreme hobby. We're born too late to colonize new continents and too early to colonize planets. Entrepreneurship is the closest you'll get to an adventure.
As for what I actually got, we sold the company for about a year's salary for about a year of work.
My co-founder went to lead a much bigger company and still runs it, and they're one of the top media companies in my country and ranked regionally. I got a job offer from a VC we pitched to, doing corporate training. It led to two months of road trips teaching at educational institutions all over the country (with free food and hotels!) Me and my wife put on a lot of weight from the buffets, lol. That led on to plenty of other projects, consulting and training mostly. One was as technical management lead for a project with millions of daily active users. I took on numerous CTO roles for startups that didn't survive after that, got burnt out from the lack of control of managing low budget teams, and went back to coding.
I got on at least 8 newspapers (the ones that people read and are in print). Some covered me and similar startups in two pages even. It felt a little hollow; the papers were top of the iceberg for all the work we put in. We got something like 1000 users from the papers, but it was dwarfed by the 3000 users organic growth spike around the time, and the hits weren't as relevant. But my mother-in-law saw it and was impressed - she had been a wet blanket about the whole entrepreneur thing until then.
The government would sponsor us for some things and educate us too. We got offers to flights to conferences and 5 star hotels, which was really nice of them, but it was awfully distracting to the mission, which was to build a better product, reach more users, and raise money to do that.
The tl;dr of it is we had a lot of fun and was a positive experience. But only if your idea of fun is spending 80% of your time building and talking to users.
