> You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1

Your lottery comparison isn’t logical. I think you’re just repeating the same misunderstanding I was trying to dispel above.

If you want to force the analogy, you would have to imagine a lottery where your win and the investor’s wins are tied together. Either you both win or you both lose. But to make the analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a lottery where their ticket purchase increase the winnings proportionally.

So in this bad forced lottery analogy, you would have a smaller number of the overall tickets, but the same odds of winning as before and the payout would be the same as before.

You’re making the common mistake of assuming that the company could get the same outcome without taking investment money. It’s common to imagine getting that your 0.1% of a sweet $1 billion IPO without ever getting diluted along the way, but getting a company to that IPO point requires a lot of cash. If a company is lucky enough to have all the cash flow they need to get there then they can do it all without dilution. Most companies need to raise some cash to get there, though.

So raising the money actually lowers your variance of getting a large payout, because the cash is what enables the growth to that liquidity event.