Actually correct.

Barbell investing: cap your downside (salary), go biggest bet you can find with the rest (early stage equity).

Founders have higher max returns, but they also have bigger variance and often forget to cap their downside when ego is on the line.

The getting lucky part, yes and this isn’t the criticism people think it is. If you keep making +EV bets and accumulate some wealth over a lifetime … did you just get lucky or are you playing a winning strategy?

Very interesting! This repo contains a catalog of risk-management strategies from investing, engineering and other fields: https://github.com/sashagutfraind/uncertainty_strategies

Seems like the technical risk budget in startup. As a startup is an exercice in exploration vs risk management that has to be successful; it should make a big bet in one dimension, and be really conservative on the rest.