I buy a lottery ticket for $1, in a moment, with no further effort. A YC startup founder grinds for years, if not a decade, to reach IPO with unknown opportunity costs. They are not the same. How many lottery tickets over how many lottery draws to equalize the odds is a fun thought experiment to quantify a dollar value for the option premium.

17 YC IPOs over how many total YC founder years (Lifetime YC companies * # of founders * years YC company active, roughly)?

(I’ve put a lot of thought into being a founder, from an aggressively data driven perspective about how to spend time, which is non renewable)