[deedubaya]

Equity should only count as a lottery ticket unless the company has IPO'ed and there is a place for the employee to actually value and sell those shares.

One could argue that if a company has had a public offering, they probably aren't at the low end of this pay scale anyway, but that's more speculative.

[savanaly]

I mean...a really, really good lottery ticket which has a much higher chance of paying out than your standard powerball ticket. It's true that there is variance in your pay if it's partially made up of equity but it's clearly not worth nothing, which is how I would evaluate a lottery ticket in practicality.

[fred_is_fred]

It's more like a lottery ticket where a VC can come in and say sorry you now have 0.001 lottery tickets and if you hit a jackpot, I get the first $50M of it before we split the rest of the pot.