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Certainly not 1 billion, which is what the lottery chances would be to win 25 times. (1 in 42m)

I don't understand this logic. The US has the Powerball lottery.

So far it has been won 403 times[1] what seems around 20 year time span. With a US population of around 360 million. So not sure why 25 winners would require a population of 1 billion.

[1] https://www.powerball.net/winners

I was using some state odds. Ok so 1 in 1m for Powerball, yet HN is ~3m, so we have 1 in 100k on HN. Already an order of magnitude difference. Then, of course, not even 1 in 100 here are actually giving a startup a serious go. So comparing successful startups to the lottery is easily 1000x off.

Do you understand what a metaphor is?

Of course. Stats say it’s a bad one though

Not really; the "lottery" includes all the stupid smaller games too.

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