I wonder, over the course of a career in startups, what is the probability that you'll either found or be an early employee at one that makes up (financially) for the rest? Not hugely rich, but better than "normal" career.
Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies yields returns over a lifetime.
Well you can calculate that somewhat, right. If you're "top-1%" in skill, enough to get hired at Google (even if you did it for the badge), then did you or did you not start a business?
Google: 180,000 employees. Let's say including ex-employees 250,000
These started 1,200 companies, according to the only source I could find. These collectively apparently made their founders ~20 billion. Let's say (heh) that it's a power law, let's say the top 10 got 1 billion each.
So we're talking the odds for an "average" software engineer to get to 1 billion is about 0.1% * 10/180000 = 0.000005556%, or about 1 in 18 million.
Odds for a current or ex-Google engineer: 1 in 18,000.
The number of billionaires yc has produced in 4000 or so startups (with many future billionaires in the pipeline) suggests your numbers are off by, what, 100x? If we assume that a Google Engineer is as qualified as a yc founder, which isn’t quite true but still.
The challenge here is not simply being in the right startup but having the right combination of startup founders (& contributors) for that particular idea at that particular time. Now, it's not like there's only one great fit for each role, but it's far from rolling a d100 too.
Given it's a repeated game, and you gain knowledge at each round, I'd say the odds are probably pretty good that the highly dynamic / fast learning environment of early companies yields returns over a lifetime.