Odds of Winning a Silicon Valley Jackpot.

The recently announced acquisition of Instagram by Facebook has evoked an article with this title:

$1 Billion Start-Up Jackpot: The Behind-The-Scenes Winners At Instagram. 

Clearly, some form of a product that appeals to the billions of netizens is the prerequisite for such a jackpot.

However, here's a little tongue-in-cheek way of analyzing for the odds.

Now, if you are an engineer with all the right personal ingredients to create a startup, you'd do well to consider the following facts:

1. The odds of someone's winning MEGA Millions jackpot, which reached recently as high as $640 million, is 1 in 176 million, according to California Lottery web site.
2. The odds of someone's winning the smaller SuperLotto Plus jackpot is 1 in 41 million, also according to California Lottery web site.
3. The San Francisco Bay Area, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first [in the United States] with 387,000 high-tech jobs.

Now, what are the odds of an engineer's succeeding in Silicon Valley? Consider this:

If the general odds of meeting another engineer with complementary characteristics is 1 in 10 million¹, the availability of a pool of 387,000 of them makes the probability of 1 among those to be your startup partner to be 0.0387, or 1 in 25. If you don't want to admit that all of the Bay Area's 387,000 can be Mark Zuckerbergs², you can narrow the field to Google alumni, Facebook alumni, etc. to, let us say, 10,000. Finding your entrepreneurial partner from among these 10,000, you get the odds of 1 in 1,000. Further, if you feel that you can only really pick one from a very small pool of an elite 100 in Silicon Valley, then the odds turn into 100/10,000,000, or 1 in 100,000.

While the foregoing is a highly simplified model of how one goes about creating startups, one thing is certainly clear:

As a brilliant engineer, you have very good odds of finding an entrepreneurial partner to succeed in Silicon Valley.

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¹ According to the 2010 census, Bay Area population is considered to be 7,150,739.

² You can substitute your favorite entrepreneur here, e.g., Google CEO Larry Page, Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff, ...