You have an idea that excites you. You have a plan in mind for turning your idea into real, functional business. It seems like the right time to act on your plan, but you can’t get past the pervasive question … “Am I just wasting my time? Don’t 99 percent of startups fail?”

As a startup founder, I know how hard that question can be. In 2010, I started EatStreet, a company that makes online ordering software for restaurants, as a student at the University of Wisconsin. EatStreet remains based in Madison to this day. Suspending disbelief and passing on post-graduation jobs to build a company was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

With a rapidly changing technology landscape, statistics on startup success are difficult to come by, and are often outdated by the time they’re published. Private companies invested $48 billion in 2014, up from more than $20 billion in 2009.

Comparing the success of a company started in 2009 to a company founded in 2015 might be apples and oranges; more than twice as much money is being invested today than a half decade ago.

But, with obvious exceptions such as Uber and Snapchat, most companies take five to 10 years to reach any kind of stable value. The world changes a lot in five years, so a lot of the research being done today comes from companies that were started in the “dark ages” before smart phones proliferated everyday life.

One of the best quantitative studies I’ve come across about the chances of achieving financial success in a startup comes from a group called 80,000 Hours.

The study is specifically on the founders who participated in Y Combinator, the oldest and most respected startup accelerator in the country.

The study looked at the classes of 2004–09 and determined that the 634 startups surveyed were worth a combined $26 billion, $8 billion of which still belonged to the startup founders, making the average founder worth $18 million.

There’s a significant caveat, though: 80 percent of that cash belongs to the founders of AirBnB, Dropbox and Stripe Payments. So, in the case of Y Combinator, the real “winners” become fabulously wealthy, but the averages mean very little. A follow-up analysis delves a bit deeper: 38 percent of companies are no longer in business, and 50 percent are either operational or sold for a profit.

Based on the professional credentials of those accepted into Y Combinator and comparing them to the values of the companies, the author argues that 12 percent of Y Combinator founders make more money than they would have made by not starting a business, 38 percent make roughly the same and 50 percent make less.

So, according to this study, and for Y Combinator companies, the chances of at least making what you would in a more traditional environment is a coin flip. Not the most reassuring odds, but a lot better than the “1 percent of startups survive” myth.

Starting a business provides more than monetary gains. In order to create a successful business, you need to be passionate about your vision.

Empirically, all the successful startups I’ve witnessed have had teams that really believe in what they’re doing. You can’t assign a dollar amount to the satisfaction of solving a problem you care about.

Starting a company for monetary gains alone reduces your odds of 50/50 to “maintain your lifestyle while doing something you truly want to be doing” to 12 percent chance of “making it big” while not doing something you care about, according to the Y Combinator study. And that doesn’t even factor in a higher failure rate of companies without real vested interest in the problems they’re solving.

Finally, persistence is a hallmark of successful entrepreneurs. The founder of Uber had a failed startup, and a failing podcast company created Twitter. If the chances of succeeding in a startup are 50/50, the 50 percent of founders whose companies don’t survive can hit gold the second time around. That moves the needle to 75 percent.

If you have an idea that keeps you awake at night, my suggestion is to act on it. The gratification of building something you care about, along with the chances for financial upside, makes it a worthwhile journey no matter how it ends.

Eric Martell ([email protected]) is the co-founder of EatStreet.