And I’m sure that some people who played the lottery actually won. That doesn’t mean that statistically counting on a payout from equity earned from a startup is worth it.

I worked at a startup for 9 month.. I left decided not to exercise any options and they got purchased very shortly after for a higher amount than anyone expected. I got a slightly higher paying position that allowed me to scrape together enough to qualify to buy a house in a large city. If I would have waited another cycle I would have been priced out.

10 years later I'm up 2 million on the house, lost 20,000-40,000 grand on the startup options. I wasn't forced to move in order to full vest and be tied to a dead product for 2 years while they figured out how to move anything of value into their applications.

There are a lot of ways to earn a million and taking more cash and investing yourself could yield more.

Impressive gain on the house! If you didn't exercise the options, do you mean you lost out on the opportunity for 30k?

Are you tapping into the value of your home with a mortgage? Otherwise, it seems like that's even less liquid than private stock (unless you move out.)

The 30k was from lost stock.

I did tap into the value recently. It's more liquid compared to most private stock but nowhere as liquid as public stock.

The one advantage is all profits on the house are tax free.

I don't think the probability of making 2.5m from a single startup is very high.