The vast majority of startup success is luck...

There are literally thousands of people going from L5-L7 at the major tech companies per founder successfully exiting a >$100M company.

Thousands, you say? [source missing]

There are only ~2300 Series C companies.

You're going to need to be this size to have a ~$100M+ exit.

There's about ~5 years between funding Series C and Series D [1].

Only ~55 Series C companies got funding in Q1 [2].

Only ~39 Series D companies got funding in Q1 [1].

You're going to have a MAX of about ~.7 * ~2300 * 1/5 = ~322 successful > $100M VC exits per year.

Ultimately, you really need to IPO to have a successful exit - and there's only ~257 per year total, only ~65% of which are VC = ~167.

~5% of FAANG is L7+ - if you're including Microsoft, Nvidia, AirBNB and all the other companies with FAANG-like pay - you're at >2M employees.

That's ~100k If the average tenure is ~10 years before retirement - you're looking at ~10k per year.

Okay - it's about ~100 per successful exit.

[1] https://carta.com/blog/state-of-private-markets-q3-2023/

[2] https://www.mosaic.tech/saas-startup-funding/series-c

Not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but if the question is about which is more likely from the perspective of an individual considering going either route, there’s also an implicit “given that an attempt was made”. You’re only comparing the absolute occurrence of each type of event rather than the occurrence relative to the number of attempts made.