> Of course, through the lens of expected value, these numbers look worse as traditionally there has been a high failure rate to startups.

"worse" here does a lot of heavy lifting here and doesn't begin to convey the magnitude of "worse"

Use YC companies as an example. Acceptance rate around 2%, success rate about 10%. This gives you 0.2% success rate for a typical startup applying to YC.

If you do succeed, unless you bootstrapped, you're going to get diluted. Let's handwave this to keeping 75% of your company (a generous assumption!).

This gives the expected value of $30k, for 2 to 5 years of hard work. Before taxes.