They are obviously not the same. But, as a founder not coming from a rich family, you may get at best 2 or 3 chances at making a decent business. So now choose: 3 chances of winning 1M at 100% probability vs 3 chances of winning 1B at 1% probability each. Which would you take if your net worth happened to be less than 200K?
Yeah, everyone knows that mean is a bad estimator in presence of outliers or long tailed distributions. The distribution of startup outcomes is exactly that yet people talk about EVs all the time.
