mgraczyk parent
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