reillyse parent
I think you are confusing how lotteries work, most lotteries have additional prizes not just the big grand prize. There are a range of prizes.
as an aside, I got to reading some lottery winning tips (https://www.smartluck.com/free-lottery-tips/california-fanta...). A real interesting hodge podge of statistical fallacies and other wishful thinkings but at the same time it does pull at our brains somehow. Like for example even though I know a run of numbers in a row are just as likely to happen as any other number I'm really unlikely to actually pick it as my guess - I suppose my brain just thinks I need some "balance" or the likelihood of this pattern happening is low. Randomness is hard.
Pick a prize amount that is anywhere in the same order of magnitude as any engineers total compensation. For any such amount, there are more people receiving prizes above this amount from startups than lotteries
But why can't you win n smaller prizes, money being fungible and all we can just tot up the smaller prizes.
The total number of lottery winners who have won, in total, an amount of say 50,000 USD is at least 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the number of people who have received that amount or more from startup equity
You are making an empirical claim that can be made rigorous, it's just off by several orders of magnitude