You can buy a lottery ticket every week and it costs $2 (just guessing — I don’t buy them). With that minimum spending over three years, you get 150 shots. You paid $300, but no time or effort.
A typical startup takes three years, and you pay for it in both real money and opportunity cost.
Let’s say your chance of getting funded is 1:100 (assuming you don’t have an existing network). And then your chances of success are 1:30 (a more realistic figure for first-time founders than one in ten, IMO).
That means the odds are 1:3000 with great personal investment, versus the lottery where in the same timeframe you get to take 150 shots at a 1:1,000,000 chance at no personal cost.
Looking at these numbers, it does feel a lot like lottery.
Of course I’m downplaying the career growth value of a startup. You learn nothing from the lottery, but going through the startup grind offers experience that you can’t get elsewhere.